Speakers
Our all-star lineup of industry experts will share their vision for future and offer practical tips for getting things done. The following is a partial list of speakers; check back as new speakers are announced.
Jason Kunesh
Jason wishes he had a great title like "gypsy beekeeper" or "wordologist" but has most recently performed as Director of User Experience & Product at Obama for America. You can often find him at the intersection of people and technology, advocating for elegant, simple solutions to gnarly problems. He's at his best when helping people work together using sketches on whiteboards and real-life prototypes to communicate ideas.
Marta Armada
Marta is an interface designer at Swwweet, a small Barcelona based web design studio. When she's not messing around with CSS, she is teaching workshops on web technologies and helping organize local events like Webcat.
Isabelle Arvers
Isabelle is a french media art curator, critic and author, specializing in video and computer games, web animation, digital cinema, retrogaming, 8 bit music and machinima. She has coordinated ISEA 2000 in Paris and Video Cuts 2001, Centre Pompidou, Gaming Room Villette Numérique 2002, Paris, Tour of the Web 2003, Centre Pompidou, featuring French and international artists.
Carrie Buckingham
After graduating from the University of Hawaii with a BFA in Graphic Design, Carrie kick started her design career in Holland for Internet publishing powerhouse Bol.com. Since then, she has lent her talents to numerous companies in need of strategic design thinking, pattern creation and systematic approaches to web design.
Silvia Calvet
Silvia is passionate about UX, specializes in conceptual design, business innovation and strategy, and loves to connect supposedly unconnected dots. Her expertise lies in understanding problems, identifying needs and constraints to create valuable products and services. As a natural facilitator, she develops projects in a COllaborative way, applying COworking and COdesign with users and stakeholders at every step of the design process.
Davide Casali
Davide, better known as Folletto, is an user experience designer and startup advisor with a hybrid background in design, psychology and technology. Believing as Leonardo DaVinci reportedly said that “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, he is specialised in social experience design, behaviour change and motivation applied to interactive and social systems.
Carolyn Chandler
Carolyn leads the User Experience practice for Manifest Digital, an interactive marketing and design firm based in Chicago's west loop. Carolyn has worked in the field of User Experience since 1996, alternating between software development and Web site design, each of which bring their own interesting challenges. Areas of focus include usability engineering, information architecture, and interaction design.
Aldo de Jong
Aldo helps corporations and startups to navigate disruptive change. With Claro he provides business innovation and service design in the context of disruptive changes in society and business, such as the personal data economy, internet of things (IoT), new models of ownership and value exchange networks. Aldo is a strategist with a strong analytical capability and business acumen, coupled with creativity and passion for understanding people.
Erica Decker
A tech native with experience in research, design, and development, Erica studied technical communications and psychology, and graduated with a B.Sc. from Clarkson University. Since then, she has focused on perfecting her hybrid user experience skills and evangelized the application of psychology to design.
Megan Ellis
Megan is a strategic designer and researcher, experienced in using ethnographic research to discover people’s needs and draw insights from large amounts of complex data. She is a creative problem-solver and approaches projects from an innovative perspective to create meaningful experiences for people. Having worked on several large projects at Claro which look at disruptive shifts in technology, society and business, she is currently exploring the emerging business landscape of the Internet of Things and its development and opportunity spaces.
Derek Featherstone
Derek Featherstone is an internationally-known speaker and authority on accessibility and web development. He is the lead of Simply Accessible Inc., a leading firm that delivers insightful and creative accessibility consulting to Fortune 500 corporations, educational institutions, public utilities, government agencies and other private
sector clients.
Vitaly Friedman
Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. Vitaly is writer, speaker, author and editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine, an online magazine dedicated to designers and developers.
Andy Goodman
Andy is a pragmatic creative, shaping his work around a deep understanding of people, technology and markets. He's been a digital native since 1994 when he was wrote a documentary called "Secrets of the Internet". After a few years playing around in the games and interactive TV industries he fell in love with mobile, and now runs the Madrid studio of Fjord, a leading Service Design agency.
Chris Heilmann
Chris Heilmann has dedicated a lot of his time making the web better. Originally coming from a radio journalism background, he built his first web site from scratch around 1997 and spent the following years working on lots of large, international web sites. He then spent a few years in Yahoo building products and explaining and training people and is now at Mozilla.
Shay Howe
As a designer and user interface engineer, Shay Howe has a passion for solving problems while building creative and intuitive products, and he specializes in user interface design and development. Additionally, Shay teaches a front-end design and development class at Starter League and helps co-organize Refresh Chicago and UX Happy Hour.
Kevin Hoyt
Kevin Hoyt is a Group Manager of Developer Evangelism at Adobe, Inc. where he has been actively involved in furthering web technologies for more than a decade. As a Developer Evangelist, Kevin is responsible for covering a broad array of Adobe technologies, and spends upwards of seventy percent of the year presenting keynotes, session and hands-on labs at events across the globe.
Johanna Kollmann
Johanna has been working in User Experience since 2004. After gaining experience in both in-house and agency-side roles, she is now a product lead at Sidekick Studios, applying design thinking, agile and lean startup to problems that matter. Her background is in Information Design and Human-Computer Interaction.
Bruce Lawson
Bruce Lawson evangelises Open Web Standards for Opera. He's been active in Web Standards since 2002, working with the Web Standards Project, the W3C Mobile Best Practices Working Group and developer education. He co–authored Introducing HTML5, the first full–length book on the subject.
Vicent Marti
Vicent Martí used to make videogames, but he sold out because he likes to wear expensive clothes. Or any clothes at all. He now works full time as a systems engineer at GitHub, focusing on security and performance issues on the backend. He's also the maintainer of libgit2, the Git library that powers GitHub's backend and native clients. He takes long showers because he enjoys smelling nice.
Chris Mills
Chris is a web technologist, open standards evangelist and education agitator, currently working at Opera Software in the developer relations team. He writes about web standards for dev.opera.com and other publications (such as .net mag and A List Apart), gives talks at universities and industry conferences worldwide, and lobbies universities to improve their web education courses.
Ronel Mor
Ronel is head of the Interactive design program at the visual communication department at Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem where he has taught for over 12 years. In 1997, he founded Mantis, a leading design firm in Tel Aviv, where he lead and directed hundreds of web related projects for internationally acknowledged brands, museums, television broadcasters, and global corporations.
Rachel Nabors
Rachel was raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains where she learned goose wrangling and Photoshop. After watching Chasing Amy at the tender age of 14, she started making comics which helped her escape rural poverty and eventually lead to a career in web development. Now she lives with her husband in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she is training to become stronger by mastering Ruby and JavaScript.
Thomas Phinney
Thomas Phinney is Guru of Fonts & Typography, including the 5000-strong web font library for WebINK, at Extensis. From 1997-2008 he worked in type at Adobe, lastly as product manager for fonts and global typography.
Luis Daniel Rodriguez
Luis Daniel Rodriguez grew up in Ecuador, South America and now lives and works in Washington D.C. He received a B.F.A. in Graphic Design and Illustration from the University of Florida and has completed graduate coursework in film and screenwriting. He has worked for the last 11 years as an interaction designer and web developer in various online startups, U.S. government agencies in the Washington D.C. metro area and higher education institutions.
Anoop Sahgal
Anoop Sahgal has global experience in leadership roles that span product marketing, product management, and business development in high technology. In his current role within Industry Strategy and Marketing at Adobe, he works with technology executives to help grow their businesses through best in class digital marketing strategies.
Christopher Schmitt
Christopher is the founder of Heatvision.com, Inc., an Austin-based new media publishing and design firm, and co-founder of Environments for Humans, a leader in web and mobile conferences. An award-winning web designer who has been working in the medium for twenty years, Christopher interned for both David Siegel and Lynda Weinman as an undergraduate at Florida State University.
Dave Shea
Dave is the creator and cultivator of the highly influential website csszengarden.com, and co-author of The Zen of CSS Design (New Riders, 2005) with Molly Holzschlag. He speaks internationally at conferences and workshops and was an organizer of the North American arm of a popular international conference series, Web Directions.
Jason Ulaszek
Jason is a crazed evangelist for user experience design - accosting strangers with sermons on its value in solving business and social problems. He's a leader in the experience design practice at Manifest Digital, serves as an adjunct faculty member in the HCI Masters program at DePaul University and is Co-founder of UX for Good.
Javier Usobiaga
Javier is a web designer and front-end developer from Bilbao living in Barcelona. He started Swwweet, his own web design studio with his wife in 2009, and they've been since building beautiful experiences for small businesses and startups alike.
Geke van Dijk
Dr. Geke van Dijk is co-founder and Strategy Director of STBY in London and Amsterdam. She is also the initiator and chair of the Service Design Network Netherlands, and co-founder of the Reach Network for Global Design Research. Geke has a background in ethnographic research, user-centered design, and services marketing & innovation. She is passionate about exploring the ways people co-produce their customer journeys by picking and mixing from multi-channel service touch points.
