Jury Alumni

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  Nicola Ralston

  VP, Global Innovation Studios, Dell Technologies

  2022 Home & Living Jury Member

  Nicola is an accomplished Designer and Design leader with extensive experience building and leading design & innovation teams for global brands. Having had a Design Career in Automotive design working for brands such as Ford, Hyundai, and Kia she then moved on to Nokia inspired by their global reach and their way of connecting people. For Microsoft Windows and Devices group Nicola built and led a multi-disciplinary, human centered, design team across Design and Human Factors that worked to articulate disruptions, product, and experience opportunities with a focus on edge devices, and looking to ambient futures. Most recently, Nicola has joined Dell Technologies as VP, Global Innovation Studios, responsible for leading the Experience Innovation Studio teams that envision, define, and build differentiated customer experiences and proof of concepts, driving innovation and disruption across Dell’s business units and product portfolios. Nicola has worked and lived as a designer in the UK, Italy, Germany, Finland, and the US.

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  Sunita Ram

  Design Lead, Idean

  2020 Service Design Jury Member

  As a Design Lead at Idean (part of Capgemini Invent), Sunita has led hybrid design teams on projects across industries including healthcare, e-commerce, education, transportation, and technology. She thrives in bringing clarity to ambiguous problems. She has created and led initiatives like Design Thinking Academies for Executives and Kids, Design Jams for designers, and Culture Workshops for her organization.
  
  Sunita holds a Bachelors degree in Architecture and a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from ITP, NYU.
  
  For the last decade, Sunita has also served as a design coach for Stanford d.school’s Extreme course. Here, she mentors graduate students who design low-cost, sustainable products and services for developing countries in partnership with non-profit organizations.
  

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  Fernando Ramirez

  Co-founder and Designer, Common Object

  2024 Furniture & Lighting Jury Member

  Fernando Ramirez is a designer dedicated to exploring the intersection of sustainability and community and how it drives value in design. Specializing in industrial design, furniture design, and environmental design, he has left his imprint on diverse projects, collaborating with both major corporations and innovative startups. His deep commitment to sustainability propels him beyond conventional boundaries, driving him to explore pathways that lead into the realm of regenerative thinking.
  
  As a co-founder of Common Object, a design studio aligned with his values for people and the planet, Fernando has forged a path guided by these principles. At the core of his studio's philosophy is a "planet- centered" design approach, empowering companies to take steps toward sustainability while fostering more inclusive connections with people. Their versatile portfolio spans industrial, furniture, medical, and interiors. A notable aspect of their work involves community projects, actively participating in co-design workshops specifically crafted to empower and uplift communities.
  
  Common Object's experience in sustainability has led to the studio's regenerative design experiment, Okaterra—a project that focuses on creating regional supply chains that collaborate with farmers to create materials for furniture. Since its release, Fernando and his design partner, Justin Beitzel, have seamlessly integrated workshops and talks into their studio flow. They are diligently working to share this thinking and posing the question, “Can the future of product design be regenerative?”

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  Alisha Ramos

  Founder/CEO, No Plans, Inc. (Girls' Night In, Whiled)

  2021 Personal Accessory Jury Member

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  Veronica Ranner

  Designer | Artist | Ph.D. Candidate, Royal College of Art

  2021 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Veronica Ranner is an artist, designer and researcher, working transdisciplinary on the intersections of design, science and emerging technologies. With a background in industrial design and design interactions, her research focuses on the burgeoning domain of bio-digitality and encompasses advanced biomaterials (smart materials), biomedical product and interface design as well as the development of experimental methods towards constructive-collective modes of futuring (see Polyphonic Futures).
  
  Veronica has 10+ years experience of working internationally across science, education, art institutions and industry via funded projects, commissions and collaborations. She is a frequently invited lecturer and exhibits her work internationally, including at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, China Technology Museum in Beijing, the National Museum Sweden in Stockholm, the V&A London, the Design Museum Gent, at Martha Herford, and the Futurium in Berlin. She currently completes her PhD at the Royal College of Art.

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  Arvi Raquel-Santos

  Sr. Staff UX Manager, Google

  2026 Interaction Jury Captain, 2026 Apps & Platforms Jury Captain

  Arvi is a San Francisco-based designer and educator with over 20 years of experience in product and brand design. Currently, he is a Sr. Staff UX Manager at Google, where he leads the App Foundations team for the Google Search app on iOS and Android, contributing to the mission of making the world's information universally accessible and useful.
  
  Previously, Arvi has worked with a broad range of organizations, from startups to global tech giants like Meta, Fitbit, and Instacart. He crafts beautiful, delightful experiences and is passionate about building design teams that solve complex problems. Arvi is driven to design products and services that connect people, inspire creativity, and empower transformative change.

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  Bret Recor

  Founder, Box Clever

  2020 Home & Living Jury Captain

  Bret is an expert in creating physical experiences that delight consumers and help companies lead market categories. Bret leads his Box Clever team to take ideas from concept to market and is committed to executing a challenge to its most brilliant realization. To do this, he balances creative vision with real-world experience of industrial design, brand strategy, and business ventures. Bret has applied his expertise to the launches of several high-profile products and initiatives, including Away, Nebia, and most recently Caraway. Bret has also launched separate studio initiated ventures including Fadestudio, with a flagship product, the Fade task light.
  
  Prior to founding Box Clever, Bret was a design director at fuseproject, working with clients like, One Laptop Per Child, Herman Miller, Johnson & Johnson, Issey Miyake, Jawbone, and the New York City Department of Health.
  
  Bret’s work has earned several awards around the world including INDEX, Spark, IDEA, iF, Clio, D&AD, FX, Spark, and Red Dot. His work is part of the permanent collections of NY MoMA, SFMOMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Centre Pompidou.

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  Gina Reimann

  Wearables Industrial Design Manager, Google

  2020 Health & Wellness Jury Member

  As Wearables Industrial Design Manager at Google, Gina leads a team making radically helpful products, bringing together the best of Google AI, software and hardware. Notable launches include Google’s headphone family and watch bands.
  
  Prior to Google, Gina has worked at the New York based innovation agency Redscout, Industrial Design agency Smart Design and Philips Design in The Netherlands.
  
  She’s designed for some of her favourite brands, including Nike, OXO, and Microsoft, and for which she has some fancy awards that decorate a shelf in her Santa Cruz Mountain home, where she lives with her wife and two cats.

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  Noah Reinhertz

  Sustainability Lead, Innovation Kitchen, Nike

  2021 Home & Living Jury Member

  Noah is a designer and the Sustainability Lead in Nike’s Innovation Kitchen. He collaborates with a diverse group of designers and innovators to blend sustainable materials, technologies and ideas into all of Nike’s advanced innovation efforts. He comes from a family of teachers, hippies and architects and feels most at home staring at the sea in a heavy fog.
  
  Over the past fifteen years or so he has created products with Herman Miller, iRobot and Samsung among others.
  
  Most recently, Noah created the Nike Space Hippie concept and together with a small group of renegade designers produced a line of shoes made almost entirely from trash. Embodying the design philosophy of progress over perfection, it was the next, radical step towards responsible product at Nike.
  
  When not trying to reinvent shoe manufacturing, Noah creates practical problems by sailing wooden boats with his family in the cold waters around Portland, OR.

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  Kat Reiser

  Senior Design Strategist, Booz Allen Hamilton

  2021 Design Education Initiative Jury Member

  Kat Reiser is a strategic thinker, driving innovation by understanding what to make and why it matters. In her time as a designer, Kat has consulted and participated in in-house design teams. She has had the opportunity to work with companies focused on housewares and packaged goods including Pampered Chef, PepsiCo, Chevron, P&G, AB InBev, and Oculus.
  
  Kat is also an instructor at Offsite, where she helps designers build the tools they need to seek employment while guiding the students through understanding and reflecting upon who they are and how they present themselves as designers.

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  Bo Ren

  Director of Product, Bravely

  2019 Service Design Jury Captain

  Bo is a product leader, writer, and angel investor. She is currently director of product at Bravely, building a human-centric and behavioral-driven platform that helps people find meaning in their professional lives. At Tumblr she redesigned the core creative tools, and at Facebook launched Facebook Notes and Instagram monetization tools. She has helped organizations scale from series A to IPO at Sunrun and Opower. She writes and speaks about product management, liberal arts thinking, and diversity and inclusion. Her work has been published in the Atlantic, New York Times, and Fast Company. She is passionate about leveraging her product background to help founders as an investor and product advisor. She tweets at @bosefina and writes on Medium.

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  Tobias Revell

  Artist & Designer, University of London

  2020 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Tobias Revell is an artist and designer. Spanning different disciplines and media his work addresses the urgent need for critical engagement with material reality through design, art and technology. Recent work has looked at the idea of technology as a territory, expectations of the future, rendering software and the occult and supernatural in pop culture discussions of technology.
  
  He holds a BA Hons. (1st) in Design for Interaction and Moving Image from the London College of Communication and an MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art from which he graduated in July 2012.
  
  As well as being an internationally exhibiting artist, Programme Director of Graphic Design Communication at the London College of Communication, a founder of Supra Systems Studio and a founding member of research consultancy Strange Telemetry. He is one half of Haunted Machines, a research and curatorial project curating Impakt festival 2017 in Utrecht, NL. He is undertaking a PhD in the Design Department at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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  Jared Richardson

  VP, Design, Colgate-Palmolive

  2022 Packaging Jury Member

  Jared is the Global Head of Design for Colgate-Palmolive, and is responsible for driving the cultural transformation towards a design-integrated organization.
  Before joining Colgate-Palmolive, Jared co-founded The Velo Group as Chief Creative Officer, was Chief Creative Officer at Fahrenheit 212, Design Director at Futurebrand and Designer at Arnell Group.
  He believes Design is a change agent for social good and is proud to work with brands such as Colgate, used in more homes than any other brand, to create maximum positive impact. He is also a proud Kiwi.

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  Vicky Richardson

  Director of Architecture, Design and Fashion, British Council

  2015 Built Environment Jury Member

  Vicky Richardson is Director of Architecture, Design and Fashion at the British Council. She organizes a busy international program of touring exhibitions, residencies, exchanges and talks and is Commissioner of the British Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale. Vicky studied at Central St Martins, Chelsea School of Art and the University of Westminster. Following a degree in architecture, she became an architectural journalist, and was Deputy Editor at the RIBA Journal before becoming Editor of design magazine Blueprint, from 2004 to 2010.Vicky is a co-director of the London Festival of Architecture and is an adviser to the Mayor on culture and creative industries as a member of the London Mayor's Cultural Strategy Group.Vicky has written several books including New Vernacular Architecture (Laurence King, 2002) and continues to write about architecture and design for a variety of publications, as well as the British Council design blog, Back of the Envelope.

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  Shawn Rickenbacker

  Assoc. Professor, Architecture, CCNY Spitzer School of Architecture, J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures

  2023 Built Environment Jury Member

  Shawn L. Rickenbacker is a trained architect, urbanist and urban data researcher. He is currently the Director of the J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures where he directs the Center’s sponsored and partnership research and is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the CCNY Spitzer School of Architecture. His research and work at the Bond Center confronts the complex urban intersection of spatial equity and the social and economic impacts of place-based policies, programs and design through the lens of urban data, forensic and design research. He’s served as Senior Research Fellow at the Phyllis M. Taylor Institute for Social Innovation, where he researched ‘Artificial Intelligence and The Future of Social Urbanism’, The Favrot Chair in Architecture at Tulane University, Gensler Distinguished Professor at Cornell University and Director of the Motorola Sponsored Future Interactions Lab at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Design. His work and research have been published in The New York Times, NY Daily News and Global Architecture, Wired and exhibited at Studio Museum of Harlem. Shawn holds a MArch with a Certificate in American Urbansim from the University of Virginia where he was the Dupont Scholar and a BArch from Syracuse University.