It is with much gratitude and admiration that we celebrate the jury alumni members of the Core77 Design Awards.
Tom Maiorana is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at UC Davis where he focuses on product design, design thinking, and prototyping. Tom’s research focuses on how low-resolution prototypes can help designers explore the human experience of interacting with complex systems. He is a Fellow at the John Muir Institute for the Environment where he uses design thinking methods to inform the strategy and development of the OneClimate initiative. Tom is also the founder of Red Cover Studios, which specializes in product development and innovation strategy and uses prototyping as a central practice in work ranging from interaction design to fashion to organizational change. Red Cover Studios helped to conceptualize and launch the Hive at the Claremont Colleges and Denison University’s forthcoming Design Lab. Tom regularly teaches at Stanford University’s d.school.
Tom has an MFA in Design from Stanford University and a Bachelor of the Arts from Vassar College.
Nicolas leads projects at the intersection of innovation, branding and transformation, with deep expertise in both design and business strategy. Over the past 15 years, he has designed a wide range of products, services, and environments. At SYPartners, he’s helped IBM, AARP and Johnson & Johnson bring to life new visions for their businesses and brands; imagined customer experiences for Old Navy, Blue Shield, and Target; and designed exhibits for Nike and IBM. Nicolas served as creative director on IBM’s award-winning THINK exhibit, an immersive multimedia experience that commemorated the company’s centennial. The exhibit is now a permanent installation at Epcot.
Prior to joining SYPartners, Nicolas was a product designer in France, where he worked on innovation projects with Alstom, Coca-Cola, France Telecom, and Umae, a fair-trade company specializing in handicraft products. Nicolas holds an MFA in industrial design from ENSCI, and an MBA from ESSEC Business School.
Ken Mak is co-founder of daCompany, an upcoming start-up delivering insights for cannabis patients into their consumption to disrupt the medicinal distribution model. He is concurrently developing With Eaze, a housewares company emphasizing clean solutions for the home. His work has spanned across industrial design, software development, product management and product marketing.
In addition to these ventures, Ken is principal of Orenga Design, a product consultancy in San Francisco helping technology companies deliver innovative user experiences. He is currently leading industrial design for Cisco's Unified Computing System’s division, responsible for a $4B portfolio. Prior to this group, he was Senior Creative Lead for Cisco's flagship Telepresence system, garnering a Red Dot Best of the Best Award.
Over the past 15 years, he has released 75+ products in the electronics and hard goods space for the likes of HP, Sony, Google, Disney, Black & Decker and a multitude of startups, earning iF Design, R&D 100, and CES Innovations Awards.
Ken holds a Bachelor of Science from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and has been a senior lecturer at the California College of Arts in San Francisco.
Matt Malpass is responsible for the Coordination of MA Industrial Design at Central Saint Martins: University of the Arts London. His research and practice centre on critical, speculative and socially responsive design practice. He has written extensivly on critical design practice and is the author of the forthcoming book Critical Design in Context: History, Theory and Practice.
Tatyana Mamut is a transformative leader, product innovator, and economic anthropologist.
She is General Manager & Director of Product at Amazon Web Services, where she is driving the development of a revolutionary new digital product. Before that, she was Vice President & Head of Product Experience for the Salesforce IoT Cloud, a big data, real-time event processing platform. She also led Salesforce’s Re-Invention of the premier CRM product, culminating in the “Lightning Experience.”
Tatyana also built and led the Organization Design Practice at global design firm IDEO. She led many high-stakes IDEO engagements including the creation of digital tools to drive citizen engagement and cultural transformation for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, development and scaling of a User-Centered Innovation Culture at Life Technologies, and the Human Centered Design (HCD) Toolkit for the Gates Foundation. She has also founded two successful consulting businesses, Emergent Thinking and CS Solutions. She has won numerous design awards for her work at IDEO and holds multiple design patents for her work at Salesforce and Amazon.
Tatyana has a PhD in economic anthropology from UC Berkeley and a BA in economics from Amherst College. She is a keynote speaker at global conferences and lectures at the Stanford D-School, focusing on technology & innovation — as well as the role of leadership & culture in creating and sustaining long-term competitive advantage in a rapidly-changing world.
Natasha specializes in human-centered design research and strategy. She is passionate about creating services, experiences, environments, and products that help people live better, healthier, and more fulfilled lives in a rapidly changing world.
In 2017, Natasha founded the design and innovation strategy consultancy Blumline, where she and her teams blend creative and scientific research methodologies to catalyze radical and compassionate innovation. Blumline's goal is to shift perspectives and behaviors around ambiguous landscapes like the future of health and wellness, the age of autonomy, and mindfulness in the digital age.
Natasha's service design experience rests at the intersection of mobility, wellness, health, hospitality, and retail for clients including Postmates, Volkswagen, Livongo, Singapore Airlines, Lincoln, and emerging brands in the boutique hotel industry.
Jon Marshall is the Co-Founder and Design Director at Map, a London-based creative consultancy that specialises in strategy-led industrial design, packaging design and UX/UI. Map’s clients include some of the most innovative and well-known companies in the world such as Virgin Atlantic, Google, Yamaha and Panasonic alongside ambitious growth companies such as Kano, Sam Labs, and Sabi.
Most recently, Jon has worked with inventive start-up BeeLine on the design of an intuitive cycle navigation device. The device puts cyclists back in control of their journey, rather than being trapped in a turn by turn navigation system. BeeLine successfully launched on Kickstarter in November 2015 and received over £150,000 of funding, surpassing their goal of £60,000. Map is also working with an emerging talent on the design of an innovative cycle safety product.
Jon graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1996 with a Masters degree in Industrial Design and then worked at leading design firms Pentagram and Ross Lovegrove. He joined Barber & Osgerby as Studio Director in 2003 and developed some of the studio’s most iconic furniture and products such as the De La Warr Pavilion Chair, Tab Lamp and the 2012 Olympic Torch before co-founding MAP with Barber & Osgerby in 2012.
Doc Martens is a designer, creative technologist, maker, teacher, lifelong student, and geek working to help people embrace the potential of speculative practice for building futures-agency, the ability to act upon our preferred futures in a complex world.
They are a UX Designer at Teach For America by day and serve on the Design Futures Initiative Board by night. They also organize the Speculative Futures NYC meetup and publish SciFly, a newsletter connecting people to global events & resources related to speculative design, art, and technology. Most recently, they helped develop and teach a new speculative futures framework, Futures x Design.
Heather is the Vice President of Design at Smart Design, a design and innovation consultancy. She leads multidisciplinary global teams on large-scale digital projects across all industry sectors from Smart’s London studio.
She has worked in design for 18 years throughout Europe and is recognized as one of the leading authorities in interaction design. In order to learn more about software development, she studied interaction design at the Royal College of Art in London. After graduating, she worked at the RCA as a visiting tutor and Research Fellow and co-founded the Appliance Design Studio between the RCA, IDEO and Hewlett-Packard Labs. In 2000, she joined IDEO where she worked as a senior interaction designer and project lead for the Prada NYC flagship store with OMA/Rem Koolhaas.
Throughout her career, she has kept a keen interest in education. In 2003, she moved to Italy to work as an Associate Professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII), where she specialized in tangible computing and became the Academic Director. In 2006, she moved to Denmark where she co-founded the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID). Positioned as a design school, consultancy and research lab specializing in interaction design, CIID was listed as one of the world’s best design schools by Business Insider in 2012.
Her client work spans transportation, finance, healthcare, media, telecom, retail and automotive. She is a regular speaker in Europe and her work has been recognised through international press and design prizes, including a Gold and Bronze Business Week Awards for her work with Prada. She was also listed as one of the 40 most influential designers in the world under the age of 40 by Wallpaper Magazine and was recently a judge for the Braun Prize 2015. She has a bachelor’s degree in product design from the University of Northumbria and a master’s degree in interaction design from the Royal College of Art.
Daniel started working in Futura as a designer in 2013 at the same time he concluded his studies in Monterrey, Mexico. 5 years later, now in Mexico City, Daniel is in charge of art direction and coordinating the team.
For more than a decade, Eric has worked at the intersection of change management, brand strategy and marketing activation. Guided by the belief that individuals and institutions do their best work when aligned around ethical stories, Eric is committed to building brands and organizations that genuinely serve people. Among his most prominent clients are IBM, Alibaba, NVIDIA, Chanel, Cole Haan, BP and Target. Eric recently founded and leads the Designing Change practice at VSA Partners, where he and a team of business strategists, creatives and facilitators help transformation leaders in Fortune 1000 companies to design their futures.
Prior to his current role, Eric launched and led the Strategy Practice at VSA. To tackle the multifaceted challenges faced by multinational brands today, he built a team of strategists with expertise in branding, design thinking, technology, market and user research, and advertising. During this time, Eric also worked closely with his partners at VSA to transform the company’s New York office from a regional, boutique design firm into a full service branding and technology shop.
With a BA in Comparative Literature and Philosophy from NYU and an MA from the University of Chicago, Eric’s background in philosophy and literature form the foundation of his approach to problem solving and opportunity creation. An Entrepreneurship Coach at NYU’s Leslie eLab, Eric is also a guest lecturer in Design Thinking at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
Daanish Masood Alavi is an investigator at BeAnotherLab, a transnational interdisciplinary group that uses art, science, and technology to promote empathy and perspective taking among diverse communities; thereby facilitating shared civic action across identity fault lines. The group uses virtual reality and techniques derived from cognitive science research in developing critical applications in art, scientific research, social projects, healthcare and education, putting a strong emphasis on the impact of the work in people’s lives. BeAnotherLab’s work is based on an inclusive and distributed model of action-research and collaborative design. From 2014-2015, Daanish was a research affiliate at MIT’s Arts, Culture, and Technology program, which enlists science and technology in cultural production, critique, and dissemination at the civic scale.
Daanish also serves at the United Nation’s Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, where he co-leads the Innovation Team, which focuses on collaboratively using human centered design, new tools and technology (AI and Machine Learning, satellite imagery, XR) to meet on-the-ground needs of UN peacemakers.
My practice is multi-disciplinary.
Using my background as an artist and development practitioner by training, I design experiences, products and futures that center often overlooked narratives.
I am a director and partner at by lue. and MM+co, two visionary African woman founded design agencies that use art and design as tools to elevate experience building in the Global South.
At by lue. we use our creative approach to advance arts and culture with a focus on honouring heritage; and at MM+co we are leaders in African Life Centered Design and infuse our principles of indigenous knowledge into the design process.
Through my work as a creator, speaker and advisor; I have partnered with African Union, Soho House, MTN, the Clinton Foundation, Roddenberry Foundation, and Roche to name a few.
Overall, my TL;DR is that I am driven to ensure that the aesthetic realm is recognised for its importance in shaping socio-economic outcomes in a tangible way.
For more than two decades, Su Mathews Hale has thrived at the intersection of design and brand strategy. Using the power of design to develop inspiring creations while solving business problems, Su has collaborated with a broad range of notable clients including Citibank, Disney, Chick-fil-A, eBay, Hawaiian Airlines, Hershey’s, Hyatt, IHG, Papa Johns, Sam’s Club, Samsung, Shutterstock, Taco Bell and Walmart.
Currently as CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Hale Design, a branding agency she opened in 2019, Su recently led her creative team on Papa Johns refreshed brand identity – the visual reflection of the new tone set by the brand - a more modern, bold, fun, fresh and tasty experience. The friendly, streamlined logo reflects the pizza chain's momentum, introduces flexibility to scale digitally and positions Papa Johns for continued success and growth. Prior to Hale Design, she was a former associate partner at Pentagram, New York, and a senior partner and creative director in design at Lippincott, where Su led global projects spanning the full gamut of brand creation and identity development. While at Lippincott, she served as creative director on the famed Walmart rebranding – a massive brand repositioning and revitalization engagement that contemporized the global retail giant while retaining the values of its heritage.
Su also serves as Chair of the Board of Trustees at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA.