Jury Alumni

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  Raja Schaar

  Assistant Professor of Product Design, Drexel University

  2018 Consumer Product Jury Member

  Raja Schaar, MAAE, IDSA is an Assistant Professor of Product Design at Drexel University. She is an industrial designer, museum exhibition designer, and STEAM education evangelist. She is an active museum exhibition designer working with community organizations, National Parks, and museums all over the country.
  
  Her interdisciplinary research focuses is on methods engaging girls and underrepresented minorities in STEM/STEAM through design and technology, innovation and entrepreneurship education, healthcare wearables, and biologically inspired design. Her current research collaborations include working with departments of Dance, Education, and computing to uncover STEAM identities in African American girls through the development of performance-driven wearable technology; developing pedagogy with Drexel’s Schools of Biomedical Engineering and Entrepreneurship to examine the role of clinical immersion on product innovation; and working with the college of Nursing to develop a pre-diagnostic wearable device for preeclampsia in low-resource communities.
  
  Before joining Drexel's Product Design faculty, Raja taught at GA Tech in both the Colleges of Design and Engineering.
  
  In addition to her career as an industrial designer and design educator, Raja has also served as the Coordinator of School Programs at the High Museum of Art, and the Director of Programs and Operations at Museum of Design Atlanta. Raja speaks on Industrial Design, STEAM and design education at conferences and workshops all over the US.

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  Alvin Schexnider

  Chief People Officer , Service + Equity Designer, Illustrator, IL Department of Human Services

  2021 Design for Social Impact Jury Member

  Alvin Schexnider (he/him) is a BizOps Lead, Service Designer, Equity Designer, and an Illustrator. He endeavors to help civic institutions become more effective, citizen-centered, innovative, and equitable. He is currently the Chief People Officer for the Illinois Department of Human Services. Previously, he worked as their Operations Program Manager (BizOps & Service Design), where he drove strategy, operations, design, and community-focused projects deemed critical by the Secretary and Assistant Secretary of Operations. He’s also Adjunct Professor of Social Design at Loyola University Chicago, and outside of work his projects include Distributive Designers Project (schex.design) and the Racial DeckEquity Cardset found on his Etsy shop schexdesign. Alvin lives in Chicago.

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  Kilian Schindler

  Founder, Bureau Kilian Schindler

  2019 Furniture & Lighting Jury Member

  Kilian Schindler studied product design in Germany and France. Werner Aisslinger, James Irvine, and Stefan Diez amongst others have overseen his projects. Since setting up his multi-disciplinary design bureau he has realized commissioned projects for internationally renowned companies in different fields: from product design to furniture as well as exhibition design.
  
  Since 2014 Kilian Schindler is doing the creative direction for TOLIX, France. His works have been recognized with coveted design awards, including German Design Award (gold), IF Product Design Award (gold) as well as the Red Dot Design Award. His designs were exhibited and published worldwide.
  
  Kilian Schindler has been teaching as visiting professor in the Product Design department at -Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung- (University of Arts and Design) in Karlsruhe, Germany.

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  Reid Schlegel

  Associate Design Director, Aruliden

  2022 Personal Accessory Jury Member

  Reid Schlegel is a NYC based Industrial Designer with a solid history working in the design consulting and education space. He is currently an Associate Design Director at Aruliden and previously worked at frog and SMART Design. As a design educator Reid teaches process drawing + digital visualization and Junior Year Studio at the Parsons School of Design and visits Universities to guest lecture and teach his design process methodologies. Additionally, Reid runs an Instagram account with 136k+ followers showcasing his work and other design related content.

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  Julianna Schneider

  Usability & Human Factors Engineer, Bausch + Lomb

  2024 Health & Wellness Jury Member

  Julianna Schneider is the lead Usability & Human Factors Engineer for the Bausch + Lomb Surgical product lines. She is an innovative engineer who is committed to developing intuitive, useful products for users. Having the ability to resonate with users, she prioritizes simplistic and meaningful designs. She leverages human centered design elements partnered with a risk based approach to ensure interfaces are optimized for users’ applications, and ultimately safe and effective for use. Harnessing her previous experience as a mechanical engineer, she frequently assesses design-related and use-related failures prior to product launch and creates solutions to mitigate these failures. Similarly, she understands the value input from multiple functionalities has and works cross functionally to ensure input is captured and incorporated into designs. She enjoys learning new things, meeting new people, and embracing challenges because they all bring growth - both personally and professionally.

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  Marvin Schwaibold

  Senior Design Lead, Squarespace

  2021 Visual Communication Jury Member

  Marvin Schwaibold is a Senior Design Lead at Squarespace where he is in charge of creating new design systems, creating prototypes and pushing the product forward. He focuses on interactive campaigns and new and interesting ways users will interact with the web on a global scale. He was previously a Art Director at Watson Design Group in Los Angeles working on interactive websites for clients like Wes Anderson, Disney,Netflix, IFC Films, Amazon Prime and Paramount Pictures.
  
  Marvins focus lies on the marriage of typography and interactive systems in the digital and print world. He strongly believes in the democratisation of good design on a larger scale.

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  Stewart Scott-Curran

  Executive Creative Director, Instrument

  2019 Visual Communication Jury Member

  Stewart is currently Executive Creative Director at Instrument, a digital and brand experience agency in Portland, Oregon. Prior to Instrument he was Director of Brand Design at Intercom in San Francisco where he built the Intercom Brand Studio from 3 to 22 people working across digital brand, content, events and everything in between. Stewart also has worked at CNN leading a redesign of their digital presence, at Coca-Cola where he led a rebrand of Sprite and at Nike where he worked for 10 years designing soccer uniforms for the best teams and athletes in the world. He is originally from Glasgow in Scotland.

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  Dr. Melis Senova

  Group Managing Director, Huddle Design

  2015 Strategy & Research Jury Captain

  As Founder and Director at Huddle, Melis is the main provocateur when it comes to encouraging creative and pragmatic solutions. She is passionate about driving change within organizations with a natural focus on human centricity, design and what it takes to thrive in the 21st century.Melis has deep academic qualifications and vast business experience, underpinned by a PhD in Human Factors (user-centered design). Her areas of expertise covers service strategy, strategic service design, experience design, concept prototyping, systems engineering, program management and human factors research.Melis is a contributing author to This is Service Design Thinking, the very first textbook on Service Design published in 2011. She sits on the advisory board for the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design at RMIT and is a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Medicine at Monash University.Melis is also co-founder of London-based Enterprise Design consultancy FromHereOn.

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  Fabio Sergio

  Vice President of Design, frog design

  2017 Design for Social Impact Jury Member

  Fabio Sergio is Vice President of Design at frog, the global design and innovation firm.
  
  He works across a wide spectrum of industries and sectors, with global leaders such as Vodafone, GE, HP, LGE, BBC, J&J, Swisscom, Novartis, Merck, UNICEF, The Red Cross and the World Economic Forum. Fabio is part of frog's global Design Leadership team, the head of frog's Social Impact Design practice, one of the firm's healthcare experts and one of its User Experience Strategy leads. He helps to advance frog's capabilities, processes and methodologies.
  
  Fabio is passionate about exploring areas at the intersection of design, technology and human aspirations, wrapping business scenarios around people's desires and dreams.
  
  He often speaks at worldwide events, including The Economist Technology Frontiers, The Guardian Mobile Summit, The Aspen Design Summit, SXSW, The Unicef Innovation Summit, Stanford Mobile Health, NEXT Berlin, LIFT Geneva. He is a professor at Politecnico di Milano, and a guest lecturer at Domus Academy, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design and SUPSI's Master of Advanced Studies in Interaction Design.

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  Jordan Shade

  Design Program Lead for Offerings, IBM Consulting

  2022 Interaction Jury Member

  Jordan Shade is a designer, researcher and leader with a bent towards a business context. She has led work in enterprise design thinking, online learning, community building, the art of facilitation, transforming organizations, engaging experiences for local government, and creating insight-led strategy. She lives in Austin, TX and currently works for IBM. Her other projects include founding the group A Functional Democracy and its calling card 'zine: A Beginner's Guide to Local Government, as well as the art collective and podcast The City Says So with partner Hal Wuertz.

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  Shady Shahid

  Principal, MAST

  2020 Consumer Technology Jury Member

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  George Sheldrake

  Service Design Consultant

  2018 Service Design Jury Member

  George Sheldrake is a service and experience designer with over 15 years in the industry, working with clients in the UK, US, Europe and Australia. She has worked across the breadth of the design industry, from magazines and branding through to product and service transformation.
  
  She believes in delivering design systems at the highest standard, from working with 90’s graphic designer Neville Brody to set up fashion magazines and culture brands, to creating the original BBC digital system GEL that is still in use today.
  
  Her service design experience ranges from startup products like BBC Global iPlayer to an ecosystem fitness product for Nike, to transforming service approach in UK government for GDS and Ministry of Justice.
  
  George is dedicated to creating products and services designed for the people that use them and the needs of the organizations around them. She is currently working with the HM Land Registry to support digital transformation and service change.
  
  She is passionate about bringing together the breadth of her experience to design systems and services to help organizations change, both ‘what they do’ and ‘how they do it’.

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  Lola Sheppard

  Co-founder, Lateral Office

  2017 Built Environment Jury Captain

  Lola Sheppard received her B.Arch from McGill University and M.Arch from Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo. Together with Mason White, she founded Lateral Office in 2003.
  
  Lateral Office is an architecture practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. The studio describes its practice process as a commitment to design as a research vehicle to pose and respond to complex, urgent questions in the built environment, engaging in the wider context and climate of a project– social, ecological, or political. Lateral Office have been pursuing research and design work on the role of architecture in remote regions, particularly the North, for the past seven years. Lateral’s work tests the potential for architecture and infrastructure to be culturally responsive, geographically scalable, environmentally adaptable, and multi-purpose in its programmability.
  
  The office’s work has been exhibited and lectured extensively across the USA, Canada and Europe. Lateral Office was awarded a Special Mention at the 2014 Venice Biennale for Architecture, a PA award in 2013 and the Holcim Gold for Sustainable Construction for North America, for their project Arctic Food Network. They received the Emerging Voices from the Architectural League of New York in 2011, and the 2010 Professional Prix de Rome from the Canada Council for the Arts. Lateral Office are the authors of the upcoming book Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory (Actar 2017) and of Pamphlet Architecture 30, COUPLING: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, published by Princeton Architectural Press (2011). Sheppard and White are also co-editors of the journal Bracket.

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  Yasaman Sheri

  Designer and Director

  2019 Design Education Initiative Jury Member

  Yasaman Sheri is a Designer and Director working with interfaces for sensing. Sheri’s research focuses on interaction of humans, machines and living things, exploring sensing beyond vision, machine perception, networked systems and augmentation of body, objects and ecologies. She has the led Core Interaction Design for the first consumer level Augmented Reality Operating System Head-Mounted Display: Microsoft Hololens and Hololens2 Windows Holographic focusing on intuitive gestural interfaces. She works closely with various companies and organizations including Toyota, Google(X), Ginkgo Bioworks, NASA Ames Research Center and others as facilitator to explore sensing and perception in Design. She is also an educator, teaching Graduate Industrial Design at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Biodesign and Sensory Design at Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design (CIID) and is frequent critic at Columbia GSAPP, Art Center College, NYU, Cooper Union, ZHdK, and Stanford University.

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  John Siczewicz

  Lighting & Compositing Artist, Skydance Animation

  2023 Emerging Technologies Jury Member

  An early adopter of digital content creation, John was at the forefront of technology in the late 1980s and 1990s. Utilizing platforms such as Quantel Paintbox and Kodak Cineon for high-end image manipulation, and soon embraced Discreet Logic’s (now Autodesk) Flame and Inferno systems.
  John found a home at the CGI pioneer Blue Sky Studios. Starting there with just a small handful of wildly creative thinkers and stayed on for twenty-six years until the studio’s closure in April of 2021.
  With close to 40 credits over the years, mostly in animated feature films, John has contributed to many of the family favorites that have entertained millions. He currently continues this path as a lighting and compositing artist at Skydance Animation.
  Always with an eye toward the future, he feels it’s essential to remain informed about emerging technologies and how they’ll affect and influence what we’re exposed to, and how we chose to access them.

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  Hector Silva

  Executive Director, Advanced Design

  2021 Design Education Initiative Jury Captain

  Hector Silva brings over 7 years of teaching experience at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Notre Dame, the Academy of Art University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Rochester Institute of Technology at their nationally-acclaimed industrial design programs. Recognized for his contributions in academia, Hector was awarded the Young Educator of the Year by the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA). An active professional in the field, Hector works as an industrial design contractor through his own studio, H Design, partnering with Crate & Barrel, DesignLab, Nickelodeon, LeapFrog, Foster Grant, Insight Product Development, Lund & Company Invention, as well as various entrepreneurs. Hector is also the founder of the design nonprofit, Advanced Design (AD), an organization awarded the Special Achievement Award by the IDSA for making design education more accessible and through disrupting the mediums through which design education has been traditionally offered. AD continues to grow today, connecting students and working professionals to foster a community of design excellence. Most recently, Hector founded Offsite, a 12 week pilot program catered towards furthering design education outside of traditional academia space. This program was developed to translate the needs of the industry into course content taught by design industry leaders. The goal is to help students develop the right skill set and mentorship to thrive on the job and support them along the way.