Jury Alumni

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  Phil Hamlett

  Director, School of Graphic Design, Academy of Art University

  2017 Design Education Initiative Jury Member

  Phil Hamlett is the Director of the School of Graphic Design at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, the largest private art and design school in the country. In this setting, he teaches classes, develops curriculum, recruits and manages instructors, advises students, manages the graduate thesis development process, conducts outreach and establishes the strategic agenda for the School. His students emerge as advanced design practitioners and go on to acquire positions at leading firms around the world. Phil joined the Academy in 2004 and served for thirteen years as the Graduate Director for the School of Graphic Design, building the nascent MFA program from scratch.
  
  Prior to becoming a design educator, Phil led design studios on both coasts, creating award-winning work for clients large and small. His extensive professional experience provides him with the perspective necessary to prepare students for the challenges of the real world. Capable of playing a wide variety of design, communication and managerial roles, he is adept at identifying creative challenges, distilling core objectives, formulating a plan of attack, and managing the team that will then fix everything.
  
  Phil recently completed his term as president of the AIGA San Francisco chapter, for which he continues to serve ex officio. He is also a former AIGA national board member, founder of Compostmodern and co-author of the Living Principles for Design — the means by which he guides the development of sustainable business practice within the design community As a charter member of the Winterhouse Institute Founder’s Circle, he helps articulate the value of design education for social impact.
  
  In his off time, he can usually be found chasing around his two adorable children (photos available upon request).

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  Zhaoxiong Han

  Architectural Designer, Gensler

  2026 Built Environment Jury Captain

  Zhaoxiong Han is an architectural designer at Gensler’s Los Angeles office. His work spans core and shell office buildings, workplace, education, and adaptive reuse projects, with a particular interest in how architecture can renew existing contexts while forming meaningful cultural and spatial relationships.
  
  In addition to practice, Zhaoxiong contributes to the broader architectural community as a juror for international competitions such as TerraViva and Archiol, where he brings a critical perspective to evaluating emerging design ideas. His ongoing engagement in design discourse allows him to remain attentive to evolving cultural and environmental questions and to participate in shaping the conversations that define contemporary architectural practice.

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  Kenya Hara

  President, Nippon Design Center, Inc

  2016 Service Design Jury Member

  Born in 1958, designer, President of Nippon Design Center, Inc, and professor in Musashino Art University.
  
  He attaches importance on “invisible” design as well as “visible” design and constantly broadens the horizon and scope in design.
  
  Art Director of MUJI since 2002. Additionally, he has produced many exhibitions, such as “RE DESIGN”, “HAPTIC” and “SENSEWARE”, which focus on value renovation. His books, “Designing Design” and “White”, are translated into many different languages and gained great popularity in many countries.

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  Chadwick Harber

  Industrial Design Director, Airbnb

  2022 Commerical & Industrial Equipment Jury Member

  Chad has been leading design in a range of innovative environments, such as start-ups, consultancies and corporations. At Airbnb, Chad collaborates with a small group of highly creative and curious wizards building the future of living, consumption and sharing. After studying in Canada where he grew up, Chad moved to the bay area, where he has been designing products with Fitbit, Microsoft and Google among others for the past 15 years. Chad believes that good design has power in minimalism yet still values warmth and humanity in its perception. For a design to be truly meaningful, it needs to be loved by the people that use it, as well as engaging viscerally and intellectually.
  
  In his spare time, Chad loves designing and renovating his mid century home, riding his bike and cooking with friends.

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  Dan Harden

  President, CEO & Principal Designer, Whipsaw

  2015 Commerical & Industrial Equipment Jury Captain

  Dan is President, CEO, Principal Designer and cofounder of Whipsaw Inc., a highly acclaimed design firm in Silicon Valley, California. Whipsaw designs products and experiences for companies around the world, from Fortune 100’s to startups.
  
  Dan is a hands-on designer and directs the strategic and conceptual direction of most client accounts. Throughout his prolific career Dan has designed hundreds of highly successful products ranging from baby bottles to supercomputers. Fast Company magazine selected Dan as one of “The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2014”, calling him “design’s secret weapon”. Fast Company also ranked Whipsaw among the ‘Top 5 design firms in the world’ in 2009 and they featured Dan as a ‘Master of Design’ in 2005.
  
  Dan frequently lectures on design topics at universities and conferences, including being keynote at the Australia Design Forum; keynote at the Wuxi Design Conference ; keynote and Chairman of the IDSA National Conference Collideoscope (’02), and he was a United Nations Design Delegate to China in ’98. Prior to cofounding Whipsaw in 1999, Dan was the President of Frogdesign where he designed many notable products and led the company for ten years. Before joining Frogdesign in 1989 he was a lead designer at Henry Dreyfuss Associates. In the early eighties Dan interned with design master George Nelson. He also interned at Hewlett Packard and Richardson Smith (later became Fitch). Dan graduated from the University of Cincinnati, College of Design, Architecture and Art in 1982.

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  Steven Harrington

  Co-Founder, National Forest

  2020 Furniture & Lighting Jury Member

  Steven Harrington is a Los Angeles–based designer and cofounder of design firm, National Forest. Steven is best known for his bright, iconic work that encourages a two-way conversation between the artist and viewer. Embracing a multimedia approach, Harrington’s portfolio includes large-scale installations, limited-edition books, product designs, graphic design, illustration, fine art and sculptures. Alongside his commercial work, Harrington has exhibited artwork in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Berlin, Milan, Barcelona, Tokyo, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Brussels, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Montreal, Melbourne, and Dallas. Recent work examples include an installation at the MIMA Museum in Brussels, a product collection for Nike, A category launch
  for BAPE, and a permanent outdoor sculpture for Loft 1 Korea.
  
  Ongoing sample clients include: Apple, Google, Hypebeast, Moleskine, Nike, International Olympics Committee & Bape.

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  Christina N. Harrington, Ph.D.

  Assistant Professor, HCI Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

  2022 Health & Wellness Jury Captain

  Christina Harrington (she/her) is a designer and qualitative researcher who works at the intersection of interaction design and health and racial equity. She combines her background in electrical engineering and industrial design to focus on inclusive approaches to support historically excluded groups such as Black communities, older adults, and individuals with differing abilities in areas of health, wellness, and community building. She looks to methods such as design justice and community collectivism to broaden and amplify participation in design as a universal language of communication and knowledge. Dr. Harrington is the Director of the Equity and Health Innovations Design Research Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

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  David Harvey

  Wine Importer, Raeburn Fine Wines

  2015 Furniture & Lighting Jury Member

  David Harvey is a wine importer with Raeburn Fine Wines, and a writer. He works with elite nature-centric wine producers of West Europe, and gets involved with closures, packaging, marketing, buying and sales. He contributes to The World of Fine Wine, the award winning publication, and has recently written an entry for The Oxford Companion to Wine (2015 edition).
  He judged at the IWC (International Wine Challenge), the world'd largest wine competition, from 2002-2004 as panel head and super-juror.
  In 2004, while working for Frank Cornelissen on Mt. Etna, he created the name 'orange wine' for the renaissance of white grapes processed like red grapes in the cellar, which has since stuck and become the international standard.
  His favourite objects include his black Parker 51s, prototypes of Paul Cocksedge's Bookmark and Ideas Tray, a Cannondale Killer V and Klein Attitude, a Herve Pennequin corkscrew by Le Thiers, a Santoku knife by Sakai Takayuki. Etc.
  David studied writing at Harvard Summer School, wine at the WSET, and photography at Filton College.

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  Stuart Harvey Lee

  Founder, Prime Studio

  2023 Commerical & Industrial Equipment Jury Captain

  Stuart Harvey Lee is the Founder of Prime Studio, a Product + Brand design consultancy based in NYC. He started his career as a Mechanical Engineer working in a steelworks before discovering his passion for Industrial Design whilst earning his Masters Degree at the Royal College of Art.
  
  He moved to New York in 1991 and cut his teeth working at both Smart Design and Able Design before founding Prime Studio in 1998. At Prime, Stuart is fortunate to work with a wide range of clients from global companies like Unilever and Bayer to startups like Harry’s and Welly. Most importantly he relishes designing products which make a meaningful difference to people’s lives.
  
  When he’s not designing Stuart can either be found challenging himself to ride the hills of the Hudson Valley on his favorite bike or desperately trying to cultivate his asparagus bed.

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  Mark Hatch

  Chief Executive Officer, TechShop

  2015 Open Design Jury Member

  Mark is CEO and co-founder of TechShop and a recognized leader in the global maker movement. Under his leadership, TechShop revenue grew 20-fold in five years and multiple new locations have opened across the US. Mark has held executive positions at firms including Kinko's, Avery Dennison and Health Net. In 2013, his book The Maker Movement Manifesto was released by McGraw-Hill Education. He has been recognized by San Francisco Business Times as one of the Bay Area's Most Admired CEOs and by Popular Mechanics as one of 25 movers and makers who are reinventing the American Dream. Mark has spoken at events such as SXSW, Techonomy, TEDx and The Clinton Global Initiative. A former Green Beret, Mark holds an MBA from the Drucker Center at the Claremont Graduate University.

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  Erik Haug

  Founder & Chief Vision Officer, LIGHT CoCreative

  2024 Sustainability Jury Member

  Erik Haug is the Founder & Chief Vision Officer of LIGHT CoCreative, a global innovation and impact collective.
  
  Alongside a dynamic network of talent at LIGHT, Erik is focused on community-driven solutions to major global issues and basic human needs:
  • Food
  • Water
  • Livability • Energy
  • Air
  • Care
  
  LIGHT has a range of core capabilities and codified consulting offerings including deep research, human- centered design, strategic visioning, technology enablement, stakeholder engagement, thought leadership and facilitating win-win-win partnerships across value chains.
  
  The core objective of LIGHT is to cultivate more collaboration, inclusion, sustainability, trust, collective action and long-term value creation in the private sector.
  
  Prior to LIGHT, Erik was the CoFounder & CEO of a venture-backed social technology startup — dedicated to building community and bringing people together in-real-life.
  In his consulting career, he has led dozens of strategy, design and innovation projects with leaders at top organizations including Deloitte, Nike, Intuit, Cisco, Lowe’s, Masdar, Li & Fung, Visa, AirBus, DHL, NEOM and Stryker.

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  Joe Hebenstreit

  CEO, Shaper

  2018 Commerical & Industrial Equipment Jury Captain

  Joe Hebenstreit is the CEO of Shaper, a human-involved robotics company focused on dissolving barriers between human intuition and machine tool automation. Shaper’s Origin is a handheld CNC router that employs computer vision and real-time positional motor control to auto-correct for imprecise hand movements and enable entirely new fabrication possibilities. Prior to Shaper, Joe led the Product Design & Engineering team responsible for Glass hardware development at Google X. He began his engineering career in the automotive industry before earning his product development stripes at frog while tackling projects across a wide range of industries including medical devices, wearables, home appliances, industrial equipment and consumer electronics. His reputation for shepherding new technology out of the prototyping lab and into consumer products led him to Amazon’s Lab126 in its earliest days of hardware development. At Amazon, he helped usher enabling technologies like touch interfaces and front-lighting to generations of Kindle e-readers.

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  August Heffner

  Creative Director, Instrument

  2021 Interaction Jury Captain

  August is a designer and creative director. He works to bridge the divide between the functionality of digital products and the emotion of brand marketing. He began by leading internal design teams at MoMA, J. Crew, Kate Spade, & Casper. He’s been a regular contributor of editorial illustrations to The New York Times and an instructor at Parsons and SVA. August transitioned to digital product design and began leading project teams for Huge, and Work&Co. Today, August leads a team at Instrument where he creates digital first brands, marketing, and products for organizations including Twitter, PATH and the WNBA.

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  Sarah Hemminger

  Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Thread

  2015 Design Education Initiative Jury Member

  Sarah Hemminger co-founded Thread with her husband Ryan Hemminger in 2004. She has eleven years of experience in nonprofit management and expertise in the development, expansion, and replication of innovative, paradigm shifting models of mentoring. Sarah has a deep understanding of the challenges that face students in successfully completing high school and accessing higher education, as well as the potential for students and volunteers to change not only their own lives but also create a positive and lasting impact on those around them. Sarah was awarded fellowships from Ashoka, Echoing Green Foundation, Open Society Institute, and the Albert Schweitzer Fellows Program, which support social entrepreneurs with innovative ideas. In 2010, Sarah received her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University for her work on the role of the cerebellum and the primary motor cortex on the time scales of consolidation of motor memory.

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  Scott Henderson

  Principal, Scott Henderson, Inc.

  2024 Lifestyle Accessories Jury Captain, 2024 Tools Jury Captain

  Scott Henderson is an American designer, artist, writer, and curator from New York City where he has risen to the pinnacle of his profession as one of the world’s leading industrial designers.
  
  Scott has designed iconic, best-selling products for companies including OXO, Microsoft, Krups, Intel, Skip Hop and Alessi, and over fifteen of Scott’s products have been best sellers at the Museum of Modern Art's MoMA Design Store. Scott believes that the goal of good design is meet the mind of the user with unimpeded flow.
  
  Scott has spoken about design throughout the world; he has won over fifty international design awards including a 2023 Red Dot Award, he has represented the United States as their Design Ambassador, he has chaired the International Design Conference, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum and the Alessi Museum.