Victor Udoewa

Service Design Lead at the CDC

Victor is a civic designer for the federal government helping to improve the government’s policies, products, and services for the public – residents, immigrants, refugees, and citizens. He also works on community projects in his city, as a community member bringing research and design skills. He works with Radical Participatory Design or Relational Design approaches using arts-based and asset-based methods, depending on what the community chooses, and has projects focused on Black Liberation using healing-centered systems approaches.

 

Savannah Keith Gress

Founder of the Liberation Collective

Savannah is the founder of the Liberation Collective, a community change collaborative that supports schools, organizations, and individuals in the joyful, nonlinear, deeply human process of getting free from systems of oppression. She uses approaches including sustained dialogue, Relational Design, systems thinking, and storytelling through data in her work to renew relationships and transform unjust systems.

 

 

Lisa Elzey Mercer

Ph.D. Student, The University of Edinburgh

Lisa Elzey Mercer’s (she/her/hers) interests include developing and executing design interventions focused on ethics and anti-oppressive design frameworks. This methodology is evidenced in her major research projects, Operation Compass, Racism Untaught, and the research she is working toward as a Ph.D. Student in Design at the University of Edinburgh. She co-authored the book Racism Untaught, published by The MIT Press in October 2023.

 

 

Natcha Poggio

Fulbright U.S. Scholar Ecuador, Associate Professor of Design, University of Houston Downtown

Natacha is a social impact design educator and passionate advocate of art and design for social change. She spearheads award-winning projects that promote sustainable development and educational awareness of global issues. Her strategic work fosters transdisciplinary, multi-level partnerships that bring positive change in local and international communities.

 

 

Raja Schaar

Associate Professor, Associate Program Director, Product Design, Drexel University

Raja Schaar, IDSA (she/her) is Director and Associate Professor of the Product Design Program at Drexel University’s Westphal Collage of Media Arts and Design. She co-chairs IDSA’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council is the past Education Director for the organization. Raja studies the ethical implications of design and technology through the lenses of speculative design and climate change.

 

Chris Baeza

Associate Program Director and Assistant Teaching Professor of Fashion Industry & Merchandising at Drexel University

Chris Baeza has had an extensive 20+ year career as an accomplished design and merchandising executive with proven results working with iconic global brands. Chris has a strong background in the business of fashion and has multi-tier capabilities in men’s, women’s, accessories and children’s fashion with particular emphasis on brand-building for different channels of distribution. 

 

Michelle Janning

Professor of Sociology at Whitman College and Co-Director of Human Centered Design

Michelle is a sociologist, human-centered design and research consultant, professional speaker, and writer living in Walla Walla, Washington. She teaches at Whitman College. She does research, speaks, consults, teaches, and writes about people research in design, changing work-life boundaries, families and intimate relationships, homes and design, technology, inequalities, education, community-based projects, cultural dimensions of childhood and parenthood, social science research methods, and popular culture.

Robin North

Faculty Fellow in Art at Whitman College

Robin North is an interdisciplinary visual artist and educator who explores the intersection of photography, history, and systemic racism, focusing on the African Diaspora and the identity of Americans of African descent. North’s research involves collecting Black family archives in the deep rural South. He uses a participatory, human-centered design approach that prioritizes collaboration and shared authority. He holds a BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston and an MFA in Art with a concentration in Photography and Multimedia from San Diego State University.

 

Jasmine Whaley

Director of Training & Belonging at Rhizome

Jasmine Whaley is an award-winning community organizer and public policy specialist. She is the Founder of The Whaley Group, a consulting firm that empowers diverse teams to find collaborative solutions to complex problems. An expert in workshop facilitation and design, she has spent the last decade leading learning experiences for thousands of activists, organizers, policy leaders, and nonprofit professionals worldwide.

 

 

Dmitri Higginbotham

Director, Center for Integrated Design. Assistant Professor of Practice at University of Texas at Austin

Dmitri Higginbotham is an educator and human-centered design specialist with a background in music education and M.A. in Design and Innovation from Southern Methodist University. He joins the college from Good Shepherd Episcopal School in Dallas, where he helped to incorporate maker education and design thinking into the school’s curriculum and facilitated design thinking sprints for the school’s board, faculty and staff as they re-imagined collaborative spaces on campus.

 

Rachael Dietkus

Founder, Principal Designer of Social Workers Who Design

Rachael Dietkus is a licensed clinical social worker, design strategist, and ethicist specializing in trauma-informed care in civic and public interest spaces. Rachael led interagency trauma-informed design projects across the federal government by integrating care and ethical frameworks into public service. She founded Social Workers Who Design, a specialized consultancy where she consults on trauma-informed practices for organizations, teams, and individuals worldwide.

 

 

Diya Abdo

Lincoln Financial Professor of English in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Guilford College

Diya Abdo is a professor, writer, and activist, best known for establishing Every Campus A Refuge (ECAR), which encourages colleges and universities to host refugee families on their campuses and to support refugee resettlement. A first-generation Palestinian refugee born and raised in Jordan, Abdo’s personal background deeply informs her work in advocating for displaced people. She is the author of American Refuge: True Stories of the Refugee Experience, which shares the powerful narratives of refugees from various regions and contexts, and which is an Alamance Reads 2024 book selection for the Alamance County Library. 

 

Saadeddine Shehab

Associate Director of Assessment and Research, SCD-UIUC

Saadeddine Shehab is currently the Associate Director of Assessment and Research at the Siebel Center for Design (SCD) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He works with a group of undergraduate and graduate SCD scholars at SCD’s Assessment and Research Laboratory to conduct research that informs and evaluates the practice of teaching and learning human-centered design in formal and informal learning environments.

 

 

Tyler Fox

Associate Teaching Professor, Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington (Seattle)

Dr. Fox is an artist, researcher, technologist, and educator. His work focuses on the ways in which nonhuman relations shape our experience of, and relationship to, the surrounding world. His teaching fosters interdisciplinary research by nourishing student-centered projects that incorporate critical theory into practice-based research.

 

 

Julia Kramer

Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan

Julia is a researcher, educator, and practitioner focused on studying and applying design processes to promote justice and health equity. As an assistant professor in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, she is particularly interested in investigating design approaches that aim to develop products, services, and systems to improve equitable access to health care around the world.

 

Avery Staton

Equity Design strategist, facilitator, and coach

Avery Staton is a practitioner focused on advancing design justice via institutional and community work. A co-founder of Reflex Design Collective, they draw on their background in city planning and public health to support community-driven design and grow the capacity of institutions to design with communities most impacted by oppression. Avery holds dual masters degrees in city planning and public health from the University of California, Berkeley.

 

 

 

Steven McCarthy

Professor Emeritus of graphic design, University of Minnesota

Steven McCarthy’s (MFA, Stanford University) long-standing interest in theories of design authorship – as both scholar and practitioner – has led to lectures, exhibits, publications and grant-funded research on six continents. His book on the topic, The Designer As… Author, Producer, Activist, Entrepreneur, Curator and Collaborator: New Models for Communicating was published in 2013. McCarthy has published papers in Visible Language, Design and Culture, Design Issues, AIGA Dialectic, The Design Journal and She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation.