Agnese Spona

Learning Designer and Founder of Ness

Agnese Spona, originally from Latvia, has made the Netherlands her home for the past 16 years. With a diverse career spanning over two decades, Agnese's journey began in journalism and public relations. Her path evolved through digital product management, parallel to academic research and thesis supervision. In the last five years, Agnese has ventured into entrepreneurship, establishing the customer experience learning business MadeFor. Building on her success, she recently founded Ness, a learning design practice that marries the principles of service design with learning design. This approach aims to redefine educational methodologies and create impactful learning experiences. Beyond her professional endeavors, Agnese advocates for women, inclusive opportunities, and sustainable practices, backed up by her founding member roles in Women in CX and the IMMA Collective. Her commitment to girl empowerment, mentoring, and teaching youth to transform ideas into prototypes embodies her vision for a more equitable and dynamic future. Her interests also extend to systems thinking and organisational psychology, disciplines that she believes are crucial in understanding and addressing the complexities of learning environments. Through her work, Agnese seeks to inspire transformation in educational systems, making them more adaptive, inclusive, and effective for learners worldwide.

Alan Colville

Service Designer & Customer Experience Strategy Consultant

Alan is an award-winning design leader. He helps organisations think differently to find user-centric and design-led ways to thrive. He has spent the last two decades consulting with the world’s highest performing FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies as well as government and public sector organisations in increasingly complex environments. Alan mentors leaders and teams, helping them to overcome challenges and craft solutions that work for both users and organisations. He also regularly contributes to design, marketing and technology events and publications. With a degree in Design and a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction, Alan’s previous roles include; founder of a design agency, web start-up and international cooperative of designers and developers, plus in-house senior roles for BT, Virgin Media and various digital agencies. Currently, Alan is helping the UK Met Office transform their weather and climate services, which are vital to the daily lives of millions. Hailing from Tipperary, Ireland, now living in Bristol, when not immersed in the world of design, Alan might be found scaling mountains or biking through rugged terrain - most notably, setting a Guinness World Record for the highest elevation cycled in 48 hours.

Alessandra Molderings-Enriconi

Associate Service Design Director at denkwerk GmbH

Alessandra is a brazilian-born service designer based in Cologne, Germany. She is passionate about addressing complex systemic challenges and exploring possibilities of applying her service design skill in new contexts. She works as an Associate Service Design Director at denkwerk, one of Germany’s leading creative agencies, where she leads a multi-talented team of experience and service designers. Over the last 15 years she has been a part of multidisciplinary teams in Brazil, Italy, Finland and Germany, working on projects related to sustainable design, cross-cultural user research and driving digital innovation in companies of all sizes.

Alex Klein

Founder, Team Human

Alex Klein is a design strategist and consultant. His design career began 13 years ago at Continuum Innovation with a project to redesign the breast pump. This project inspired his design ethos—that every product and service, even the most functional, has the ability to shape our deeper well-being. This inspiration also led him to found Team Human, an innovation consultancy dedicated to designing services that support people at a deeper human level. Team Human partners with organizations like NASA, Sam's Club, and the University of Utah Health System. In addition to his work at Team Human, Alex writes the weekly newsletter 'Empathy & AI' to explore design, research and humanity in the new era of technology. Alex also serves as an assistant lecturer at MIT. Alex studied at Georgetown University and MIT. He lives in Chicago, where he spends as much time as possible on Lake Michigan.

Andreas Pattichis

Design Director, Partner @ Hellon Ltd

Andreas always refers to himself as “a Nordic Designer with a Mediterranean Twist”. Andreas is an award-winning Design Leader with 12+ years of experience in Strategic Design, and currently is the Design Director and Partner at Hellon. Our vision is to harness the limitless potential of human creativity and technological prowess in order to seek new horizons of innovation, and have been awarded the Global Service Design Award 5 times. Andreas has been part of Hellon's transformation through his role as a partner, and is especially recognised for encouraging sustainable practices to be considered for both business and environment, with a particular passion towards under-represented communities and always aiming to deliver true impact in his work. With an academic background in Design, Andreas considers himself a Designer at heart. As a leader, he is driven to discover the true purpose and fun of doing CX by embracing his passion for people and building communities around him.

Andy Polaine

Design Leadership Coach & Author

Dr. Andy Polaine is a design leadership coach, educator, and writer who helps clients build and grow their own design and innovation capability, transform their organisations and themselves. For several years he worked at Fjord where he was global Group Design Director of Client Evolution. He is co-author of the Rosenfeld Media book, Service Design: From Insight to Implementation, now a standard text for Service Design. Andy has nearly three decades of experience in design and innovation with clients across a range of industries, including financial services, public services, life sciences, telecommunications, automotive, media, design and education. He holds a PhD from the University of Technology, Sydney and teaches on the MA Service Design at the Hochschule Luzern, Switzerland. He can be found online at polaine.com, as @apolaine on Mastodon, Twitter as @apolaine. He writes a popular newsletter called Doctor’s Note and hosts the Power of Ten podcast.

Angélica Flechas

CEO and Founder in Háptica

Founder and CEO of Háptica, the first service design consultancy in Colombia, Angélica Flechas holds an MBA from Hult University. She is a designer and lawyer with a specialization in commercial law from Universidad de los Andes. Currently, she serves as a professor of Creativity and Legal Service Design at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and Universidad Alfonso Ibañez in Chile.

Anna Kholina

Design director at Futurice Helsinki, PhD candidate at Aalto University

Anna Kholina is a service designer and design director working on the intersection of digitalisation, strategy and sustainability. She’s also a doctoral candidate at Aalto University where she’s writing her thesis about urban design and suburban transformation.

Arthur Yeh

Independent Service Design Consaultant

Arthur Yeh, approaches the discipline of service design with a unique blend of expertise and humility. His journey, marked by continuous learning and collaboration, has led him to become a Certified Professional Facilitator by the International Association of Facilitators (IAF). Arthur believes deeply in the power of collective wisdom and the transformative impact that thoughtful, inclusive dialogue can have on organizations and communities. Beyond his facilitation practice, Arthur extends his passion for service design through the ""Watercooler Conversation"" podcast, a project he undertakes with the aim of demystifying service design for a broader audience. Here, he invites listeners to join him on a journey of exploration, covering everything from the fundamentals of service design to its nuanced impact on global and local scales. Each episode is crafted not as a lecture but as an open dialogue, where Arthur, with a learner’s curiosity, engages with thought leaders, practitioners, and innovators in the field. Arthur's work—spanning facilitation, education, and communication—reflects a holistic commitment to advancing the field of service design. Through his endeavors, he aims to foster a greater understanding and appreciation of how thoughtful design processes can lead to more effective, empathetic, and sustainable solutions in business and society. In every aspect of his work, Arthur embodies the principle that true innovation is born from collaboration and a deep, empathetic understanding of the human experience.

Ave Habakuk

Head of Process Development at the City of Tallinn

Ave Habakuk and Helelyn Tammsaar met at the Estonia's Public Sector Innovation Team, working to make public services more human-centric and user-friendly. Ave’s background in behavioural economics and Helelyn’s training in social anthropology brought unique perspectives to the team's innovation programs, innovation sprints, and workshops that combine service design, ethnographic methods, co-creation, and policy experimentation.

Bryanne Gilkinson

Adidas - Global Senior Director, Service Design and Business Architecture

Bryanne Gilkinson is the Global Senior Director of Service Design and Business Architecture at adidas. Her work has been recognised internationally by SDN, Core77, and the ARCET Global Customer Centricity Awards. Previously, Bryanne led design and product teams at one of the largest insurance firms in North America, and helped build and scale four social impact start-ups on three continents. Through this work, she served adults who had sustained permanent disabilities due to a workplace accident; young women seeking higher education in post-genocide Rwanda; juvenile offenders in Washington DC; survivors of sexual abuse in Sri Lanka; and financially excluded entrepreneurs in Kenya.

Coral Michelin

S&T Product Manager, Professor and Researcher in Design

Michelin is a strategic and ecosystemic designer, graduated in Environmental Management (UESA), with a master in Strategic Design (Unisinos), and a Ph.D. in Design (UAM). She is an independent and academic researcher with a focus on ecology, regeneration, systemic thinking, diversity (DE&I), futures, and decoloniality. She is the Science and Technology Product Manager at re.green, a company that restores tropical forests at scale in Brazil. She was the Director of Mobilization of Communities of Innovation at (011).lab, the innovation laboratory in the City Hall of São Paulo, and was the coordinator of the Bachelor's Degree in Product and Service Design at Istituto Europeo di Design (IED). Michelin is a professor at IED, ESPM, and visiting professor at Unisinos. On her personal domain, she is an ecology and indigenous rights activist, poet, artist, and feminist.

Gaelle Le Gelard

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Gaelle is a circular service designer. She supports companies in their Circular Economy journey. Helping them understand what their business would look like in a circular world and working with different functions to grasp their role in making this circular vision happen. Previously she was Design Lead at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation where she focused her work on fostering Circular Economy innovation; from realising the key role of design in enabling the Circular Economy to empowering designers to create products, services and systems that are regenerative by design. She has published a report on the key role of design in the advent of a regenerative food system that builds biodiversity and help tackle climate change and presented it at COP26 in Glasgow. The complexities of designing circular supply chain systems has also been an area of focus in her work as she believes it will be a key unlock to scale the circular economy.

Helelyn Tammsaar

Public Sector Innovation Team of Estonia

Ave Habakuk and Helelyn Tammsaar met at the Estonia's Public Sector Innovation Team, working to make public services more human-centric and user-friendly. Ave’s background in behavioural economics and Helelyn’s training in social anthropology brought unique perspectives to the team's innovation programs, innovation sprints, and workshops that combine service design, ethnographic methods, co-creation, and policy experimentation.

Jennifer Briselli

Co-Founder & Principal at Topology

Jen Briselli is a strategist, service designer, researcher, and educator who helps people realize the transformative potential of risky play, complexity informed strategy, and transdisciplinary collaboration. Driven by a deep curiosity to understand the hidden patterns across disparate domains and to empower other humans with these insights, she partners with brave leaders at these intersections to provoke, construct, (and sometimes subvert), toward the co-creation of innovative services, products, and experiences that enable people to live well - on their own terms. Most recently as Chief Design Strategy Officer at Mad*Pow and now as co-founder of Topology, a systems-oriented experience strategy firm, Jen works with purpose driven organizations who want to improve experiences and outcomes for the people they serve.

John Sexton

PhD – Experience Strategy and Service Design Lead, Slalom Michigan

PhD leads Experience Strategy and Service Design at Slalom Detroit. He specializes in connecting the dots between business value, human experience and the technologies that enable it all. He is a leader in Slalom’s Global Service Design Center of Excellence and has 20 years consulting experience.

Josina Vink

Associate Professor of Service Design, Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO)

Josina Vink (they/them) is a service designer and researcher with expertise in service ecosystem transformation. They are an Associate Professor of Service Design at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) in Norway. Josina’s research focuses on how people can move from simply reproducing the status quo, toward reshaping social structures to enable significant, long-term change in social systems. They teach and supervise Master’s and PhD students in service design, with a focus on critical, dialogic and action-based design pedagogies. Josina has worked for ten years as a service designer in health and care, including at the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation in the United States and the Center for Addition and Mental Health in Canada. They have extensive experience facilitating participatory design processes in healthcare, government, non-profit and community settings. In their practice, they have developed new services, supported policy change, facilitated shifts in practices across sectors and led social lab processes. Josina completed their PhD on service ecosystem design at the Service Research Center (CTF) in Karlstad University, Sweden, during which time they worked as an embedded design researcher in Experio Lab Sweden. Josina enjoys writing and publishes actively in design and service journals. They currently act as Associate Editor for Contexts – The Systemic Design Journal and Journal of Services Marketing, as well as sit on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Service Management. In addition to geeking out about service design, Josina loves bees, zines, reading memoirs, picking mushrooms in the Norwegian woods, and dreaming about pizza farms.

Juha-Matti Kosonen

Director, Head of Design at Siili Solutions

Juha-Matti is a digital strategist, designer, and a design leader. Over two decades, he’s been working both in strategy, design, and digital agencies applying service design to multitude of projects. Currently he leads the design and strategy function and community as the Director, Head of Design at Siili Solutions (a European consultancy of +1000 people, and the SDN Award commercial category winner in 2023). Juha-Matti typically works in the intersection of business strategy, customer experience, digital products, and digitalisation. Despite having worked on the private side, Juha-Matti describes himself as a design nerd who looks up to academia. At the moment he’s interests lie in the opportunities that AI will bring to business and customer experience. Siili Solutions is all-in on AI-assisted design and development, and the teams are currently exploring the possibilities and the pitfalls of these transformative domains.

Julia Dinoto

Experience Strategy and Design Consultant, Slalom Michigan

Julia Dinoto is an Experience Strategist and Designer. Recognising that products are integral components of larger services and ecosystems, she approaches her work from the systems-level and uses creative methods to problem-solve and connect the dots between human and business value. She also has a keen interest in how well-structured design operations enable harmony and accelerate teams towards their goals, and she believes in the power of cross-functional collaboration and harnessing each team member’s unique talents. Her industry experience spans automotive, financial services + fintech, manufacturing, technology, and utilities.

Kristofer Kelly-Frere

Creative Practice Lead with J5 Design

As Creative Practice Lead for J5 Design, Kristofer Kelly-Frere makes magic serious business and wants to help you explore the edges of what seems possible. J5 is a design studio dedicated to creating a kinder, more beautiful future together in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. With more than 15 years of experience in senior design roles, Kristofer has worked across a range of public, private, and government institutions to craft experiences, lead deep engagement, found design labs, and deliver ground-breaking social impact projects. Kristofer led the team responsible for “Braver Training Grounds” – a project with Red Deer Housing Authority that won the 2022 Global Service Design Award and is joining the faculty of the SD-SI European Union Service Design Masters Program in 2024. Success like this is the result of his love for playing in the mud of ambiguity to move innovative dreams across the threshold into reality.

Marie van Driessche

UX Researcher, Designer & Accessibility Specialist

Marie van Driessche is a Deaf UX Researcher and Designer at Unc Inc. in Amsterdam. With over a decade of experience, she specializes in creating meaningful and inclusive digital experiences by focusing on UX design, research, and accessibility. She ensures their solutions meet the highest standards of inclusivity and leverages data insights to make design decisions that resonate with users. Currently, at Unc Inc, she works on projects like a waste recycling app for municipalities and self-help tools for addicts at Jellinek. Additionally, she teaches UX/UI and Detailed Design at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, mentoring students and participating in various lectures. Marie is passionate about advocating for accessibility in digital design and ensuring user-friendly, inclusive solutions. Her commitment to enhancing user experiences is unwavering, guiding her team to uncover insights that drive impactful design decisions. She is also an active speaker on UX and accessibility, having presented at meetups and international conferences like AWWWARDS and UX Salon. Besides all the above, she loves to kitesurf, gardening and reading cookbooks in bed before falling asleep.

Markus Edgar Hormess

Partner at WorkPlayExperience, Co-author This is Service Design Doing

Markus Edgar Hormeß is a well-known consultant, practitioner and educator in the field of service design and design thinking. In his daily work, Markus helps organizations tackle complex business problems and make team cultures more agile and human-centered. The focal point of his work is strategic prototyping, where he constantly pushes the boundaries of what a dedicated team can achieve with limited resources. Markus co-wrote “This is Service Design Doing” and “This is Service Design Methods”, top-selling books which have become the standard reference books for many practitioners and academics. He teaches service design, innovation, and sustainability at various universities globally, and is adjunct professor for service design thinking at IE Business School in Madrid. In 2023 he co-initiated the Teaming with AI conference and community. His growing interest centers on how AI influences our approach to teamwork and collaboration, as well as the broader impacts on innovation and the development of strategies that are resilient in the face of future challenges..

Naman Mandhan

Experience Research and Strategy Consultant, Slalom Michigan

Naman Mandhan is an Experience Researcher and Strategist at Slalom. In his work, Naman is passionate about using storytelling to help clients understand the depths of human complexity within their customers and use research insights to drive outcomes that are rooted in human-centered design. His work has spanned the public sector, automotive, financial services, technology, and non-profit industries.

Naseria Saruni

Service Designer at ThinkPlace

Naserian Saruni, a service designer at ThinkPlace, blends over 5 years of expertise with a passion for sustainable development. Notable projects include creataing ownership of urban environments of Nairobi's youth through HipHop Architecture, co-designing a sexual reproductive health education framework with Fryshuset Sweden and HopeRaisers, and coordinating projects to enhance public spaces in Nairobi's informal settlements. At ThinkPlace, she conducted BMGF research on the maize value chain in Kenya and currently works on a GAVI-funded Learning Project in the HORN of Africa, aiming to improve vaccination strategies for Zero Dose Children. Naserian received the 2022 WIRE Presidential Award for redesigning Mukuru Kwa Njenga's resettlement using the Her City Toolkit. She holds a degree in Architecture from Jomo Kenyatta University of Technology and is a Mideva Idea Studio alumni. Find design portfolio below.

Nathalie Salas

Managing Director of Inibus & Co

Nathalie is a challenger in service and business design, with a rich background that spans the vibrant sectors of both private and public domains. Renowned for her ability to decipher complex strategic challenges, she employs a holistic, creative approach to uncover innovative solutions. At her core lies a profound empathy, guiding her in crafting user-centric systems that bridge gaps and make tangible impacts. A natural facilitator, she excels in drawing out collaborative insights, fostering environments where diverse ideas converge to form solutions that function seamlessly and resonate deeply. Her strategies, alive with adaptability and practicality, are tailored to nurture startups and organisations, steering them towards exceptional service experiences. Through her work, she embodies the essence of multidisciplinary collaboration, driving forward the mission to create impactful, inclusive service designs that leave a lasting mark.

Niels Corsten

Sr. Lead Service Design & CX Transformation at Deloitte Digital

Niels Corsten is a senior service design lead with over a decade of experience doing design and transformation work. After years of agency work and leading the service design team at Vodafone, Niels is now leading the service design and transformation practice at Deloitte Digital, where he is driving topics like design maturity, journey analytics, journey management and orchestration.

Nicole (Cole) Bennett

Lead Service Designer, Laerdal Medical

Nicole is a service design leader with a background in behavioral science and facilitation. With experience across public health and government innovation, she has successfully navigated and excelled at developing services within complex environments. She is passionate about tackling challenging problems by leveraging creativity, co-design, and systems thinking methods. With her expertise in service design, Nicole has a proven track record of delivering innovative solutions that drive positive impact. Her body of work includes catalyzing innovative adolescent health programs in the federal government at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health; designing maternal and child health interventions at Jhpiego; and supporting the shift toward competency-based education in Nursing Schools while at Laerdal Medical.

Oliver Muchiri

Business Lead, Service Design & Systems Strengthening at ThinkPlace

Oliver leads the Service Design & Systems Strengthening practice at the ThinkPlace Nairobi office. His passion lies in mastering design in complex systems to deliver user inspired services. Collectively, Oliver has more than 8 years of experience working as a designer as well as a management consultant. Oliver works with leaders and clients in both the public and private sectors to imagine positive futures, and bring them into existence using design. What excites him most is how to design well with people: to get the process right, to get the right outcomes, anchored to the real world, people and all their complexity. He previously worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers as a Consultant with comprehensive accomplishments leading business transactions and cross-functional teams on various local and global projects. He is also the co-founder of the ‘School Painting Drive’ Initiative which seeks to support and inspire children from under privileged backgrounds by co-painting their classrooms and in the process, creating meaningful connections with the kids. In his free time, Oliver enjoys making random drives to new places, watching political thrillers and he plays amateur golf.

Oona O'Brien

UX Researcher and Service Designer and Service Design Student at Glasgow School of Art"

Oona is a Franco-Irish Service Designer and User Researcher with a rich background working in-house and as a consultant spanning six countries across Europe, Africa, and North America. With extensive global exposure, Oona developed a passion for how culture influences our interactions with products and services. In today's dynamic landscape, where designing for diverse cultures is imperative, Oona's passion for research and understanding multicultural nuances drives her work. Her favorite projects include co-creating a shadow playscape with children in Germany, and leading a multicultural team of design researchers on the topic of immigration in Italy. In a past life, she also recrafted the design strategy of a chocolate factory in Morocco! She is always dedicated to broadening her knowledge and engaging in meaningful discussions on these topics.

Paula Wuth

Director of Experience and Strategy at New | Professor at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

Paula Wuth is Director of Experience and Strategy at New. She is also an Assistant Professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC), where she teaches in the MBA program, Advanced Design Master program and undergraduate programmes from the Design School and Sustainable Development Institute. She is also a researcher at the UC Public Innovation Lab. Her professional and academic practice focuses on service design, design-driven innovation, participation, and strategy. She holds a double degree from UC in business and economics and design. She is co-author of different publications about design, including two articles in the Touchpoint Service Design Network Journal, entitled: "Ensuring Future-Proof Organisations: A Strategy for the Future Through Design" and "Speculative Labs: Shaping Future Management Practices Through Collaborative Scenario Experimentation". She also developed the Design for Innovation Method for radical innovation, which has been applied in the private, public and academic sectors, as well as in different courses at the university. Paula has collaborated with companies and institutions in Chile, Latin America, and abroad, developing projects about customer experience, employee experience, strategic planning, radical innovation, and more. Her approach deeply integrates theory with practice, ensuring all stakeholders are part of the process and moving from design to implementation. Paula has been the Director of Research, Development, and Transfer at the UC Design School.

Pablo Fernandez Vallejo

Academic Coordinator, Universidad de San Andrés (UdeSA), Buenos Aires

Pablo Fernández Vallejo is a designer with a rich background in design education and Service Design, currently serving as the Academic Coordinator for the undergraduate Design program at Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires. His educational journey includes advanced studies focused on Open Design for Innovation through a collaborative program between the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Buenos Aires, complemented by studies in Design Thinking at the Hasso Plattner Institute. Pablo brings a wealth of practical experience and academic insight, particularly in service design, to his teaching roles at Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Nacional de La Plata. As a passionate advocate for human-centred design, Pablo co-founded BAServiceDesign, a non-profit initiative dedicated to promoting service design in Argentina. Through organizing meetups, jams, and DXS—Argentina’s pioneering conference on service innovation—his efforts have significantly contributed to the local design community. His professional experience includes pivotal roles such as design lead at the General Directorate of Innovation for the City of Buenos Aires and service designer at LABGobAr, the Argentine Government's innovation lab. In 2017, Pablo's dedication to civic innovation was recognized with a fellowship from Five by Five, affirming his commitment to developing projects that address social and public sector challenges across Argentina, Germany, Spain, and the Philippines.

Satu Miettinen

Professor of Service Design

Satu Miettinen is currently a Professor of Service Design. She works as the Dean of the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland in Finland. She has worked as the Principal Investigator (PI) in numerous national and global research projects. She has worked as an expert in different national committees: Several committees at the Ministry of Finance for the development of accessible services a steering committee for the Design Finland Programme at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment. Satu Miettinen has also worked as a visiting professor at the following universities: Stanford University and the University of Washington in the USA; Tongji University in China and University of Trento in Italy. She has special expertise in service design. She is leading a service design research group “Co-Stars” as well as a doctoral thesis seminar on service design at the University of Lapland. She has supervised and co-supervised 21 Doctoral and almost 100 Master’s thesis. She has initiated one of the first Master’s programs on service design. She has also contributed to international networks such as SDN and Cumulus to promote service design. She is an active author in service design. She has authored and edited 14 books with high-quality publishers such as Routledge. Her other publications include more than 100 high-level ranked peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings. She has edited several books in the Finnish language with Teknologiateollisuus for endorsing the design and service design vocabulary and language to thrive also in Finnish.

Setthawut Fang

Head of Behavioral Design Lab & Business Designer at Sand Studio & Co.

Steven is an interdisciplinary designer who is on a mission to help make the world a better place through design, business, and technology. He is currently working as a designer at Sand Studio & Co., a design agency based in Bangkok, Thailand. At Sand Studio, he is the head of Behavioral Design Lab, an internal unit that tackles world’s toughest challenges through the behavioral lens. His core mission for the Behavioral Design Lab is to drive positive behavioral change to people, organizations, and the world. The mission is backed by his core belief that positive behavioral change and better decision making are the keys toward a more thriving and prosperous future for all. His current focus is on bridging the gap between behavioral science and design to create positive behavioral change and sustainable impact to society. On the side, Steven has recently started a news publication called Signal Change at the beginning of 2024, a new publication where he crystallizes behavioral science academic research papers and the latest behavioral insights in a way that’s easily digestible, understandable and practical for the general audience. Through Signal Change, Steven aims to broaden the exposure of this relatively new field of behavioral science, especially in the global south and the region of Southeast Asia. Steven’s passion and experience in working at the intersection between design, business, and technology act as the key drivers in driving innovation towards addressing the world’s toughest challenges in the 21st century.

Stephen Wood

Designing better customer experiences with innovative tech @Salesforce | Host of the Service Design YAP podcast

Stephen specializes in bridging the gap between design, business & tech teams.He helps companies apply Human-Centered Design to drive innovation that generates commercial value. Stephen has held management roles in blue-chip tech companies, major consultancies and boutiques. He has built multi-disciplinary teams that have delivered better results at every point of the innovation cycle and better experiences for customers and colleagues. For over two decades, Stephen written, lectured, (and occasionally podcasted) about the world of Design & Customer Experience. He focuses on the point at which emerging tech, evolving human behaviors and business converge -as this is where the magic tends to happen-.

Thomas Schönweitz

CEO of Whitespring Innovation

Thomas Schönweitz is one of the leading consultants for innovation, digitalization and transformation in the social economy. He combines the most innovative methods from Lean, Agile, Design Thinking and Service Design with social competence and the inner development of employees. He represents renowned companies such as Arri, EnBW, Caritas and the Goethe Institute. Thomas Schönweitz has an SME and entrepreneurial background, is an author, lecturer and successfully develops state-of-the-art training formats for more impact. He offers a unique approach to the implementation and successful realization of innovation and digital projects. In addition to technical and methodological know-how, employees are equipped with cooperation skills, thereby bundling synergies and perfecting teamwork. By combining external and inner development, the impact and effect of the social enterprises goes far beyond their own benefits. The entire sector becomes sustainable and society as a whole benefits."

Annika Madejska

Senior Designer and Ethical Expert at Nitor

Annika carries a torch for trustworthy and ethical technology. She has become a voice advocating for responsible and sustainable development of technological services, while still being passionate about all the amazing things that tech and AI can do for us. During the last few years she has worked on cutting edge AI services in the healthcare sector that have been taken into use at hospitals and research institutions around the world. Most recently she has been working on a groundbreaking green technology within the construction industry. As a digital designer at Nitor, a digital engineering company based in Finland and Sweden, she has carved out a lead position as an Ethical Expert and she is often asked to do talks on the topics of trustworthy technology, AI and the ethical debt in digital services. She utilises speculative and critical design to flex the ethical muscle and to catch at least some unforeseen and unwanted consequences of digital services. Annika was one of the key contributors to the 2024 Teaming with AI whitepaper, bringing her knowledge of ethics of AI into the mix. Before she jumped ship and became a full time designer, she had a 16 year long career as a journalist working with visual news presentation and developing new concepts for both print and online products in Sweden and Finland.

Hanna Harris

Chief Design Officer, City of Helsinki

Hanna started as Helsinki’s second Chief Design Officer in 2020. Her task is to lead Helsinki’s pioneering work in using design to build the city’s future. Prior to this, she was Director of Archinfo Finland (2016-2020), the national promotion and collaboration platform for architecture. She was Commissioner of the critically acclaimed 2018 Mind-Building exhibition at the Finnish pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Previously she was Programme Director at Helsinki Design Week and at The Finnish Institute in London. She has also worked as an urban researcher at the University of Helsinki and Aalto University and abroad at the universities of Cambridge, Westminster and Milano-Bicocca. Hanna regularly speaks at international conferences and contributes to numerous publications. She is the host of Paimio Conversations podcast and a Trustee of Helsinki City Premises Ltd.

Jani Turku

Chief Creative Officer & Improvising Engineer at Ideapakka – tools for cool facilitators

Jani is an engineer turned facilitation professional. His background in Chemical Engineering, combined with Applied Improvisation, has evolved into a unique blend of understanding experts' mindsets and how they prefer to be trained and facilitated. Currently, Jani serves as the CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Ideapakka. He facilitates, trains facilitators, and develops facilitation tools. Jani is passionate about enabling creativity and helping organizations run more smoothly. Hhe also makes great sandwiches and doesn't take himself too seriously.