Jury Alumni

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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, 2022 Home & Living Jury Member

  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.

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  Maria Silva

  Brand Strategist & Senior Designer, Mucca Design

  2020 Strategy & Research Jury Member

  Maria Silva's passion is discovering the compelling kernel of truth at the root of each brand and using it to create a unique story. In addition to being a brand strategist at Mucca Design, she is an award-winning designer, with recognition from CommArts, TDC, LAD, and BID, and a master’s degree in brand strategy from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Some of her recent clients include Union Square Hospitality, WeWork, 7Fresh, Fairway, and Ficosota.

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  Laura Silva

  Vice President, Accessibility Technology UX Design Lead, Bank of America

  2021 Design Education Initiative Jury Member

  Laura Silva is Bank of America’s Vice President, Accessibility Technology UX Design Lead. Previously, she worked at Amazon in the Global Search team as Accessibility and D&I designer. She’s originally from Bogota, Colombia but calls the U.S. her home. In her work, she focuses on inclusion, diversity and equity for her customers and coworkers.
  Her experiences being “the first and the only one” as a Afro-Latina in tech inspire her to advocate for the business and cultural benefits of highlighting the intersectionality of their customers.

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  Stephen Simantiras

  Head of Creative, Canfield Scientific

  2026 Medical & Healthcare Jury Captain

  Stephen Simantiras is an award-winning industrial designer and creative leader who is passionate about transforming ideas into impactful products and experiences. With over 17 years in the design industry, he has focused on blending creativity, strategy and empathy to deliver human-centered design solutions.
  
  As current Head of Creative at Canfield Scientific, Inc., Stephen leads the Industrial Design and UIUX initiative to further accelerate the brand grow a team of a talented designers. He focuses on harmonizing form, function, and user experience to build a stronger brand language and fuel creative innovation.
  
  Previously, he spent more than a decade at HS Design Inc. (Ensera Design), growing from Industrial Designer to Director of Design. During that time, he led multidisciplinary teams through every stage of development, from research and concepting to prototyping and production. Through this he collaborating closely with clients and his team of designers to bring novel ideas to life. Stephen has designed and developed products for a wide range of industries, including consumer goods, consumer medical devices, and first kind healthcare solutions.
  
  Additionally, he has served over a decade as an adjunct professor of design at Kean University. Here he taught industrial design principals, model making, CAD, rendering, and animation.

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  Jayson Simeon

  VP, YETI Design, YETI

  2024 Sports & Outdoors Jury Member

  Jayson is a design leader turning design thinking into action. He leverages the experience from his diverse creative career for the benefit of every challenge he takes on, bringing focus to the fuzzy front end, embracing the difficult challenges, collaborating transparently, leading with integrity.
  
  Jayson has led some of the industry's best industrial design and user experience teams through complex programs to create successful product + brand solutions in nearly every industry imaginable.

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  Andrea Simitch

  Associate Professor, Cornell University, Department of Architecture

  2016 Built Environment Jury Member

  Andrea Simitch is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. She teaches courses in architectural design, architectural representation, and furniture design. She served as Director of the Bachelor of Architecture program from 2011–14, as Director of Undergraduate Studies from 2007–08, and as Associate Dean of AAP from 2002–03. She has been a panelist on the New York State Council on the Arts, a department representative for the Cornell Council for the Arts, and was a faculty collaborator with the Andrew Goldsworthy workshop at Storm King. Val Warke and she partner in a collaborative architectural practice and recent projects include the Nalati National Park Resort and the Eco-Tourism Strategic Planning Proposal, both for Nalati, China, as well as numerous design competitions that include the Arbedo Castione school in Ticino, Switzerland, the Center for Promotion of Science of the Republic of Serbia Competition, Benetton Competition "Designing in Teheran”, and the Stockholm City Library Competition.
  
  She has taught extensively for Cornell in numerous international venues that include Europe and Central and South America and is regularly invited to lecture and participate in diploma juries and symposia at peer institutions, most recently in Italy, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Student work from her furniture design course has been exhibited at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. She was a 2015 Fellow at the Baer Art Center in Hofsós Iceland. The Language of Architecture: 26 Principles Every Architect Should Know, a book she co-authored with V. Warke and published by Rockport Publishers (June 2014) has been translated into four languages. She received her B.Arch. from Cornell in 1979 and also attended Occidental College and l'Ecole Special d'Architecture in Paris.

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  Mike Simmons

  Director of Product Design, Playground Global

  2019 Health & Wellness Jury Member

  Mike currently serves as Director of Product Design at Playground Global, which is a venture investment firm with an added studio of product development and technical experts. Here he blends his consulting, product design, and entrepreneurship experience to help aspiring hardware startup companies create great products and strong businesses. Prior to joining Playground, Mike worked for Google where he built a team and managed the product design and mechanical engineering efforts first with Android and the Nexus line of products and then adding projects with Chrome and Chromecast. Before that, Mike led product design efforts for startups, created new products and businesses at Lunar Design, and ran his own consulting practice. Through these experiences, he has helped develop products across industries and for many clients such as Apple, Danger, HP, Motorola, and SanDisk.
  
  Mike first realized his passion for designing and inventing products while earning his degree in the Product Design program at Stanford. He later went on to fuel his interest in business and entrepreneurship by obtaining an MBA at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Mike grew up in Montana, and he loves to return to his home state for skiing, fishing, and simply taking in the Big Sky.