Eugene Korsunskiy

Associate Professor of Engineering, Co-Director of the Design Initiative at Dartmouth College

Eugene Korsunskiy teaches human-centered design and co-directs the design initiative at Dartmouth. He co-founded Sparktruck, in an effort to bring back creative, hands-on learning to school through a curriculum of workshops and a truck to deliver them. He taught at the Stanford D.School and is the Executive Director of the future of design in higher education community of practice

 

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.

 

 

Arturo Escobar

Professor Anthropology, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Arturo’s main interests are political ecology, ontological design, and the anthropology of globalization, social movements, and technoscience. He is the author of Designs for the Pluriverse (2018), and is engaged in transition design projects in Colombia.

 

Michal Osterweil

Associate Professor, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Michal is a radical homemaker and community actionist. Her main areas of interest are social movements, new theories/imaginaries of social change and the intersection of knowledge production, epistemology and change work.

 

 

 

Kriti Sharma

Assistant Professor of Critical Race Science and Technology Studies

Kriti Sharma is a Postdoctoral Scholar in microbial ecology in the division of Geology and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, USA She is the author of Interdependence: Biology and Beyond (2015). Her main interests are microbiology and microbial ecology, philosophy and social sciences of biology, and ontology and metaphysics.

 

 

 

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.

 

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. She has offered 50+ keynotes and workshops, and appeared in dozens of national and international news stories, podcasts, and interviews about her work.

 

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.

 

Susie Wise

Adjunct at d.school, Director of Strategy at ACCFB

Dr. Susie Wise is an equity-focused designer and currently the Director of Strategy at the Alameda County Community Food Bank. She is the author of  Design for Belonging: How to Build Inclusion and Collaboration in Your Communities (2022) and a co-creator of Liberatory Design. She is a long-time educator at the d.school at Stanford University and has a PhD in Learning Sciences and Technology Design. She lives in Oakland, California.

 

 

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 social worker-designer and the founder of Social Workers Who Design. Her experience spans 20+ years of advocacy and leadership with social justice non-profits, the federal government, and higher education, including the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, AmeriCorps, the Serve Illinois Commission on Volunteerism and Community Service, and the United Nations Human Rights Council. Rachael is also a licensed clinical social worker, certified clinical trauma professional, and a fellow with the Social Work Health Futures Lab. Her interest and passion for integrating social work values with design-centric methods started while pursuing her MSW in 2008 and have deepened in her work as part of the Design for Responsible Innovation MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

 

Radka Newton

Personal Chair in Innovation and Management Education at Lancaster University

Radka Newton is a human-centered educational designer inspired by diversity, creativity and open innovation. She has two decades of senior input into global educational networks with proven reputation for developing collaborative and cross-functional teams. Her current research investigates the application of human-centered design principles to complex organizations, with focus on the Higher Education sector and policy design in regional governments.

 

 

Diya Abdo

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

A second-generation Palestinian refugee born and raised in Jordan, Dr. Abdo’s teaching, research, and scholarship focus on Arab women writers and Arab and Islamic feminisms. She has also published poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her first book AMERICAN REFUGE: True Stories of the Refugee Experience was published in by Steerforth Press in 2022.

 

 

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.