Anna Kirah, CPH Design
Anna Kirah’s passion is people-centric design and concept making. Anna Kirah facilitates change from the perspective of co-creation within companies and organizations wanting to approach the rapidly paced global world we live in.
Prior to joining CPH Design as a partner and vice president, Anna was the dean and faculty member of 180º Academy, an international school for radical innovation. Anna has also served as the Senior Design Anthropologist for the Microsoft Corporation, responsible for global field research and co-creation within Windows and MSN.
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Poonam Bir Kasturi, Daily Dump
Poonam Bir Kasturi is a trained industrial designer. She is the founder of the design company Playnspeak. Her experience with teaching and working in both industrial and craft sectors inform her work on her consultancy and design projects. Currently she has designed a series of Home Composters for the urban Indian context and founded Daily Dump which is a company that sells these solutions through an open-source platform.
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Ric Grefé, AIGA
Richard Grefé is the executive director of AIGA, the professional association for design in the US; AIGA represents 22,000 designers working in all communication design media and many other disciplines of design. AIGA's mission is to advance designing as a professional craft, strategic tool and vital cultural force. Ric has focused particularly in providing thought leadership in integrative design thinking, multicultural design, design's role in the global economy, and the potential for design to address global issues.
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Emily Pilloton, Project H Design
Emily Pilloton is the Founder and Executive Director of Project H Design, a nonprofit coalition of 300+ designers working on product design initiatives that empower individuals, communities, and economies. Current projects include water transport systems, a math playground for active education, and foster care therapy spaces. Emily is also the author of "Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People," which will be published in September.
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Pam Nyberg, Whirlpool Corp.
Pam is an award-winning design professional with global consulting and corporate experience in innovative strategy development and design research. Previously, she was employed by Doblin, Procter & Gamble, Newell Rubbermaid, and IDEO. Her past client list includes HP, McDonalds, Microsoft, Eli Lilly, Pepsi, Philips, Steelcase, and Boeing. She has guest lectured at Stanford University and IIT’s Institute of Design, as well as serving as an IDEO University instructor. She is fascinated by innovation in emerging markets.
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Pieter Jan Stappers, Delft University of Technology
Pieter Jan Stappers is professor of Design Techniques at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology. He heads a research group at ID-StudioLab that focuses on supporting the early phases of designing. Key elements in the work are user studies and user participation in the contextmapping project, experience prototyping techniques, the role of design skills within research, and design education.
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Lisbet Thyge Frandsen, Grundfos
Lisbet is driven by the urge to make a difference through involvement and co creation in the intersection between innovation, research and business. Lisbet holds a MSc in Structural Engineering and joined Grundfos in November 2007 as GSVP and head of People&Strategy. Her previous work experience includes positions as Group Holistic Officer and CEO in businesses as different as Consulting Engineering and Accounting.
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Martin Delfer, Danish Design Association
Martin Delfer is newly elected chairman of the Danish Design Association (DDA), the trade association for the Danish design companies. Martin’s main objective is to increase awareness about the value of design and highlight design aspects such as strategy, innovation and communication and new business opportunities.
When not representing DDA, Martin is also the director of brand strategy and communications at Designit, one of the leading strategic design agency in northern Europe.
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Christian Bason, MindLab
Christian Bason is head of MindLab, a unit for citizen-centred innovation. MindLab involves citizens and businesses in the co-creation of new public policy and services. MindLab is part of the Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs, the Ministry of Taxation and the Ministry of Employment. Christian is a regular columnist and blogger and the author of three books on leadership, innovation and change in the public sector.
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Heine Knudsen, Schneider Electric
Heine Knudsen is native Danish but rose professionally abroad. Today Heine is Marketing Director in Schneider Electric Danmark A/S, representing one of the world’s largest and leading companies within energy efficiency. With an educational from both electrical engineering and business management he has been focused on business development and strategy and has also acted as guest lecturer in the same fields.
Several of the business strategies have been implemented and recognized as best practice.
Heine is a strong believer of cross functional and cross cultural development.
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Ashwini Deshpande, Elephant Strategy + Design
As a trained Graphic Designer from NID, Ashwini embarked upon the unexplored sector of design entrepreneurship in 1989. As India's largest independent design consultancy, Elephant Strategy + Design has played a pivotal role in establishing the business of design for over 20 years.
Ashwini divides her time between facilitating management students learn design thinking, pro bono work for NGOs in heritage & nutrition sectors and professional consultancy to help products & services become relevant in the emerging markets; later being her priority at the moment.
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Uday Dandavate, SonicRim
Uday Dandavate is the founder and CEO of SonicRim, a global design research company engaged in studying people, cultures, and trends around the world.
Uday is passionate about pushing the boundaries of imagination in client organizations by facilitating interactions within multidisciplinary teams in an organization and between multiple stakeholdes in a value chain. His focus is on facilitating innovation through co-creation.
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Mette Johnsen, Novozymes
Mette Johnsen is Sustainability Manager with Novozymes, the world’s leading bioinnovation company. She strongly believes that sustainability needs to be understood and developed through a value chain approach, embracing the complete cradle to grave environmental and social impact of consumption in companies’ innovation and cooperation. Her key focus today is the detergent industry and working towards developing sustainability as a driver for market strategies. – Mette is a pioneer of the I DO 30 campaign which is an example of how companies can seek to engage with the value chain and consumers to realize the sustainability potential in reducing wash temperatures.
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Eric Brown, ImpactGames
Eric Brown co-founded ImpactGames to influence society and promote change through interactive media. Toward this end, ImpactGames developed PeaceMaker, a video game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to promote dialogue and understanding. Unlike most serious games, PeaceMaker aims to bridge the gap between education and entertainment and reach a mass market. PeaceMaker has been sold in over 60 countries, been featured in media outlets around the world, and has won several international awards. Eric was listed among "100 Social Entrepreneurs Changing the World" in Newsweek Japan. Eric Brown holds a Masters of Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon University and received a BFA in Painting with focused studies in education and computer graphics from Washington University in St. Louis.
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Liz Sanders, MakeTools
Liz Sanders works at the front end of the changes taking place in design. She believes that co-creation practiced with a human-centered mindset has the potential to impact the significant social challenges we face today. She uses her company, MakeTools, as a vehicle for exploring new forms of generative tools for collective creativity. Liz divides her time equally between consulting and teaching in order to accelerate the change design process.
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Martijn Pater, Fronteer Strategy
Martijn Pater has had almost 10 years experience in management consulting, of which many years in co-creation. He specialises in co-creation strategy consulting - finding new paths to growth for companies through building sustainable relationships with the outside world. As a partner at Fronteer Strategy he has advised global leaders in many industries on their open innovation challenges. Also, he has recently written a white paper on the 5 Guiding Principles of co-creation.
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Banny Banerjee, stanford
Banny Banerjee is Associate Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford and the Director of the Stanford Design Program. He also heads the Stanford Design for Change Center. Banny is involved in exploring transdisciplinary processes and paradigms that would cause large scale impact for global issues such as energy and climate change. He is interested in the ways in which "design thinking" can be used to create large-scale impact by combining innovation, technology, human behavior, new ecosystems for business, sustainability and the dynamics of rapid change. He has extensive experience in human centered design and has worked in the fields of architecture, design, structural engineering, energy, mechanical engineering, economic development work in emerging economies, sustainability, software design, and technology art.
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Adisorn Supawatanakul, Conifer Research
Adisorn Supawatanakul is an industrial designer and design researcher who directs client teams to expand their understanding of their customers and discover innovative opportunities. A director at Conifer Research, Adisorn focuses on cross-cultural research and collaboration, most recently to identify new opportunities within emerging markets. He also developed a data management process that enables research teams and clients to perform more customized analysis and arrive at richer results. Adisorn is adjunct faculty at IIT Institute of Design where he also holds a M. Des in Human-Centered Design.
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Gitte Just, Danish Design Association
Gitte Just is CEO of the Danish Design Association (DDA), the trade association for the Danish design companies. DDA was established in 2007 by a number of leading design agencies. Since then, Gitte has worked hard to create awareness around DDA and change the existing mindset and connotations of design.
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Arturo Pasquel, Vestas
Arturo Pasquel has been a global minded practitioner of co-creation for 15 years. He is currently leading a team of Change Agents that are engaged in transforming manufacturing processes and tools for the wind industry, as R&D Tooling Director. With a technical background in Engineering and Management, Arturo has acted in the global arena throughout the whole value chain of product and process design.
He is a free soul with a passion to shorten the distance between a better future and today, in a collaborative cross cultural environment.
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Simona Maschi, Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design
Simona Maschi – Director of the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) and Head of Programme of the Interaction Design Pilot Year – is an expert in Service Design and Design Methods.
Her main focus is on envisioning future scenarios and experiences for people’s everyday life. In particular, she designs new concepts of services enabled by innovative technologies for both the public and the private sector. She is interested in new design solutions that support companies towards a stronger attitude to environmental and social responsibility. Her last works in collaborations with academia and industry have explored different topics, such as private and public transportation, health and wellbeing and sustainable housing.
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John Raabo Nielsen, Coloplast
John Raabo Nielsen, MBA currently holds a position as Senior Vice President of Global Research & Development in Coloplast A/S, a market leading medical device manufacturer. During his 14 years in the medical device industry, he has had management positions within sales, marketing, manufacturing, business development and innovation in private and public start-ups as well as large global companies in Denmark, UK and Hungary.
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David Kester, British Design Council
Since autumn 2008, David has focused the organisation on designing out of the downturn. This includes providing high-level mentoring services to several thousand SMEs in order to accelerate the flow of innovative products and services to new markets. Within Whitehall, David is promoting new approaches that turn social challenges such as crime prevention, chronic disease and climate change into UK business opportunities.
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Merete Brunander, DDC
Merete Brunander is the Danish Design Centre’s new director of design and innovation. One of her main responsibilities will be to manage the DDC’s close dialogue with the Danish business sector, including the DDC’s new business consultancy service. The Danish Design Centre offers Danish companies tailor-made consultancy aimed at enhancing the companies’ value creation by using design in connection with innovation processes and business development.
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Mikal Hallstrup, Designit
Mikal Hallstrup is co-founder, partner and Chief Visionary Officer of Designit – Denmark’s largest and most international strategic design consultancy. Mikal's passion is human-centred, strategic design with a strong focus on co-creation. His extensive experience spans a range of sectors, such as energy, healthcare and consumer electronics. He has a particular interest in sustainable solutions and innovation in emerging markets. Mikal is a previous board member of the Danish Design Association.
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Lavrans Løvlie, live|work
Lavrans Løvlie is a founding partner of live|work and director of their Nordic office in Oslo. Here he has led service innovation projects for Sony Ericsson, Sony, Aviva/Norwich Union, the BBC, airport operator BAA, the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for Health Services, Gjensidige and FINN.no. During the last years, Lavrans has lectured and run seminars at design instutes throughout Europe. He is a regular conference speaker and has appeared on CNN’s «Global Office» speaking about service innovation.
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Mikael Fuhr, DSB
Mikael Fuhr is Director of Design at DSB, the Danish State Railways, where he is responsible for the company’s visual appearance across all touch points. He also established and today heads the DSB Design Vision Lab for cross-disciplinary and cross-departmental user-centred design and development.


He is passionate about promoting knowledge sharing and real understanding across the organisation to stimulate creativity. Mikael’s work aims to connect design and business disciplines by promoting and focusing on users needs. He has completed numerous in-house workshops using methods from ethnography, service design and design thinking.
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Ole Mølgaard, DR
Ole Mølgaard is the Head of Music at DR (The National Danish Broadcasting Corporation) with responsibility for music on all media platforms. Ole is passionate about involving DR’s listeners and viewers in the process of developing the company’s services, and is currently running two projects where the users are developing services within heavy rock and jazz music. Ole has a background in the radio industry, and has been one of the pioneers of successful digitalisation of radio broadcast in Denmark.
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Yasmina Haryono, Vodafone
Yasmina Haryono is currently based in Düsseldorf, Germany where she is User Experience Manager at Vodafone. She ponders, plays with and prototypes experiences around the themes of people, privacy and identity, presence, possession and panopticon.
She has worked for Experientia, Italy and Philips Design, Netherlands, exploring and designing everything from experience strategies for global corporations, to ambient healthcare experiences to touch-screen and small-screen consumer products.
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Mark Andeer, OfficeMax
Mark Andeer is the Vice President of Brand Strategy at OfficeMax Inc., one of the largest retailers in North America. With a strong belief in consumer insight Mark has lead and created work that has been recognized as some of the best in the world.
Prior to joining OfficeMax Inc. Mark was the Creative Director at BBDO, Art Director at Lowe (NYC), graphic designer at MTV. In these roles Mark won international awards for clients such as, Heineken, Sprite, KPMG, HSBC, Lego and many more.
In his spare time Mark is invited to speak at design conferences, judge award shows and practices Brazilian Jiu Jitsu which makes it tough to argue with him too much.
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Kevin Gallagher, Targus
Kevin Gallagher is Vice President of Design for Targus Group International, Inc.
He is an experienced design director with in-depth knowledge of design and manufacturing processes critical to the development of innovative products. Skilled planner and strategist adept at developing and connecting design solutions to clients’ key strategic goals.Seasoned team leader and effective collaborator.
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Torben Thyregod Jensen, Velux
Torben Thyregod Jensen is intensely working with radical innovation in Xi, an initiative under the VELUX umbrella. VELUX Xi focuses on sustainable solutions through cooperation based on common awareness – towards a new global mindset.
One of the new sustainable projects will be presented at COP15, Copenhagen 2009 and is the natural consequence of SOLTAG, a co-project between four companies in Denmark with the aim of creating a sustainable CO2-neutral rooftop “home” focusing on architecture, daylight and energy. The SOLTAG home has been exhibited in Copenhagen end exposed widely all over Europe and been the reason for many lectures held by Thyregod Jensen.
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John Heskett, Hong Kong Polytechnic University