Jury Alumni

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  Michal Levin

  VP of Product, Hero

  2021 Strategy & Research Jury Member

  Michal is the VP of Product at Hero, aiming to help people manage their health better, and live their lives to the fullest. She is passionate about solving hard problems that make a difference in people’s lives, and in a career of over 15 years, led UX and product across Google, Verily Life Sciences, Zoox, modu and more. She authored the book "Designing Multi-Device Experiences" (O'Reilly Media) and several other publications, mentored dozens of startups, and spoke at local and global conferences. Also the mom of two toddlers, an avid audible listener and a big fan of live music shows.

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  Parul Vora

  Designer, Researcher, Technologist, User Experience Specialist, IDEO

  2021 Strategy & Research Jury Member

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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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  Laura Forlano

  Associate Professor of Design & Director of Critical Futures Lab, Illinois Institute of Design

  2021 Speculative Design Jury Member

  Laura Forlano, a Fulbright award-winning and National Science Foundation funded scholar, is a writer, social scientist and design researcher. She is an Associate Professor of Design at the Institute of Design and Affiliated Faculty in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology where she is Director of the Critical Futures Lab. Forlano’s research is focused on the aesthetics and politics at the intersection between design and emerging technologies. Over the past ten years, she has studied the materialities and futures of socio-technical systems such as autonomous vehicles and smart cities; 3D printing, local manufacturing and innovation ecosystems; automation, distributed labor practices and the future of work; and, computational fashion, smart textiles and wearable medical technologies. She is an editor of three books: Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press 2019), digitalSTS (Princeton University Press 2019) and From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011). She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

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  Arianna Orland

  Co-founder, Creative Director and Experience Designer, In/Visible Talks

  2021 Interaction Jury Member

  Arianna is a seasoned creative leader, community builder, and holistic thinker fluent in product, brand, and marketing with a deeply held passion for the craft of design. With over 20 years of industry experience, Arianna draws from an enormous quiver of design processes and techniques to galvanize teams and projects to success. Currently, Arianna's impressive client roster includes Twitter, Instacart, and Lyft.
  
  Arianna is the co-founder of In/Visible Talks, a conference for creative professionals that celebrates the art of design. Now in its 5th year, In/Visible Talks has hosted 50+ speakers on the topic of creativity from all over the world. She proudly serves as Board President of Creativity Explored, a San Francisco based nonprofit that gives artists with developmental disabilities the means to create and share their work. Arianna also frequently writes on the subject of creativity and her work has been featured in prestigious publications such as Co.Design, 99u, and Forbes.

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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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  Lona Vincent

  Strategy & Innovation, Johnson & Johnson

  2021 Health & Wellness Jury Member

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  Lora Appleton

  Founder, kinder MODERN & Female Design Council

  2021 Design for Social Impact Jury Member

  Lora Appleton is a thought leader, celebrated designer, curator, gallerist and founder of kinder MODERN and Female Design Council. Leading the charge for womxn in design, she is working to shift the narrative away from “traditional” gender roles and family structures and towards womxn’s technical skills, artistry and professional merits.
  
  Appleton formed the Female Design Council as a direct response to the long history of imbalanced representation of gender in the design industry. FDC is dedicated to engaging equity and tangible gender parity in design. Appleton continues to focus her furniture and rug design efforts on thoughtful, practical and sustainable design in the family home. She serves on the NYCxDESIGN Steering Committee and is a Board Trustee at the Blue School in Manhattan.

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  Magdalena Paluch

  Co-founder and CEO, LabTwin

  2021 Consumer Technology Jury Member

  Magdalena is the co-founder and CEO of LabTwin. She is a passionate design-driven entrepreneur with over 15 years of design and hands-on execution experience in building digital products and leading cross-disciplinary teams in an agile fashion.
  
  In her previous role as Director at BCGDV, she was responsible for building up from scratch more than ten corporate-backed start-ups in Europe and the U.S., primarily focused on the healthcare space.
  
  Before joining BCGDV, she worked as a Senior Innovation Strategist at Toyota, where she was responsible for identifying and implementing emerging technologies in mobility and robotics such as autonomous vehicle design.

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  Matt Pugmire

  Principal Industrial Designer, Logitech

  2021 Home & Living Jury Member

  As a Principal Industrial Designer at Logitech, Matt’s focused on crafting iconic new hardware designs and experiences with a diverse group of problem solvers that make up the gaming design team. Prior to Logitech Matt was an Industrial Design lead at NewDealDesign in San Francisco where he built creative partnerships and developed ambitious new product visions for tech startups and industry leaders such as Microsoft, Comcast, Herman Miller and more.
  
  When not working, Matt can be found appreciating the great outdoors with his three daughters in tow.

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  Katelan Cunningham

  Editorial Director, Lumi

  2021 Packaging Jury Member

  Katelan Cunningham (she/her) is the editorial director of Lumi's small-but-mighty B2B content empire, creating resources that brands need to make the best packaging decisions for their business and the planet. Katelan produces the Lumi podcast, Well Made, and the video series, Unboxing Things.
  

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  Stephan Ango

  Co-founder, Lumi

  2021 Packaging Jury Member

  Stephan Ango is the co-founder of Lumi, the marketplace that helps brands find and work with packaging factories. Lumi enables seamless collaboration between brands and suppliers to deliver sustainable, memorable and cost-effective packaging.
  
  Stephan also hosts the Well Made podcast, highlighting the people and ideas that are shaping our patterns of consumption for the better.

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  Jens Martin Skibsted

  VP, Mobility & Foresight, Manyone

  2021 Transportation Jury Captain

  Jens Martin Skibsted is VP of Mobility at Manyone. He is a multiple award-winning designer, entrepreneur, & design philosopher and part of the “Davos” think tanks. Known for his urban mobility designs for Biomega, & collab with Bjarke Ingels. His designs live in the collections at the MoMA, SFMOMA and many more. A published author, and expert blogger.

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  Éva Goicochea

  Founder and CEO, Maude

  2021 Furniture & Lighting Jury Member

  Éva Goicochea spent her early career as a legislative aide in healthcare then 10+ years in ecommerce and digital strategy working with Squarespace, adidas, and Everlane. She co-founded her first company, Tinker Watches, in 2015. Converging her passion for healthcare and brand, she launched maude, an inclusive modern sexual wellness company in 2018. To-date, she's one of only 20 Latinx women to raise over $4 million and was voted Entrepreneur's 2019 100 Most Powerful Women, WWD's 60 Power Players in Healthy and Beauty, and Fast Company's 2021 Next 1000. In 2020, she joined the board of Peer Health Exchange.

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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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  Alisha Ramos

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

  2021 Personal Accessory Jury Member