Shana Agid is an artist/writer, designer, teacher, and scholar-activist whose work focuses on relationships of power and difference in visual, social, and political cultures. Her collaborative design practice focuses on exploring possibilities for self-determined services and systems through teaching and design research. His writing on design, politics, and pedagogy has been published in journals including Design Studies and Design and Culture and in edited books focusing on practice-led research and design ethics. She is an Associate Professor of Arts, Media, and Communication at Parsons School of Design in New York, US and holds an MFA in Printmaking and Book Arts and MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts (CCA) and a Ph.D. in Design from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).

Other events:

Holding it open: Building capacity for self-determined collaborative service design

Kate McEntee is an early-career design researcher. She holds an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons School of Design and is currently a PhD candidate in the WonderLab at Monash University. She is interested in how to approach human-centred design with greater awareness of, and responsibility for, identity, power and systemic inequality. Her research works at the intersection of contemporary social design practice and decolonial theory and practice.

Other events:

Categorising people: Tensions in critical approaches to design

Lara De Sousa Penin is an Associate Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design, where she has been director of the Transdisciplinary Design graduate program from 2015 to 2019. A full-time faculty in the School of Design Strategies since joining The New School in 2008, she has taught in the Transdisciplinary Design MFA, the Integrated Design BFA and the Strategic Design and Management BBA programs teaching studios, intensive and elective courses involving service design for public interest, systems thinking and participatory methods as well as advising master degree theses. Lara is also a core faculty member of the new Graduate Minor in Civic Service Design.

Other events:

The workers tarot. A tool for designer-worker solidarity

Martina Čaić is a post-doctoral researcher at CTF - Service Research Center at Karlstad University in Sweden and Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Finland. She is also an associate researcher at Hanken School of Economics in Finland. She received her PhD from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, where she was a Marie Curie Fellow funded by the Service Design for Innovation Network (SDIN). Her research addresses customer experiences in value networks, with a particular focus on robotic and ambient assisted living technologies. Specifically, she conducts research in healthy aging contexts, employing a service design mindset, tools, and methods to understand consumers' perceptions of disruptive technologies. Her research has been published in the Journal of Service Management, Journal of Services Marketing, International Journal of Social Robotics, and International Journal of Design.

Other events:

Addressing echo chambers in service design with embodied methods

Quo vadis? Exploring the future of service design

Sean Donahue is the Principal of RCD/LA and core Faculty in the Graduate Media Design Practices Program at ArtCenter College of Design.

International recognized for his socially-driven design and design research, Sean is co-founder of Art Center College of Design’s Graduate Media Design Matters+Field program, and principal of RCD/LA, his award-winning California based design practice. Sean’s multi-disciplinary practice is devoted to using design as the vehicle to engage 21st Century Global issues in local contexts. Focused on issues of social inequity, exclusion, access, authority, and power through the lens of design.

Dr Reuben Stanton is a strategic designer and researcher, and a co-founder and Managing Director at Paper Giant.

He holds a PhD in Interaction Design, and has a background in software design and development. This training, combined with his extensive commercial and public-sector experience, gives him an understanding how design can lead to real action and change.

At Paper Giant, he works with many clients across the public and private sector, including recent work for the Supreme Court of Victoria, Worksafe, as well as numerous local, state and federal government departments. He is passionate about access to justice, and has extensive experience applying systems thinking and human centered design to the justice sector in Australia.

He believes that design should bring organisations closer to the communities that they serve, so that they can make better decisions that lead to positive social outcomes.