Dr Yoko Akama is an Associate Professor in communication design at RMIT University. Her design practice is informed by Japanese philosophy of between-ness and mindfulness, to consider how and what futures can be created together. She has won several awards for her research with communities to strengthen their adaptive capacity for disaster resilience in Australia. Her current work contributes towards the efforts of Indigenous Nations enact self-determination and governance. Yoko is a leader and co-founder of several design networks – Service Design Melbourne and DESIS-Lab Melbourne – to support a diverse community of practice to tackle complex problems through design.

Dr. Bas Raijmakers is co-founder and Creative Director of STBY in London and Amsterdam. STBY is specialised in creative research for service design and innovation, and works for clients in industry and public sector. Bas has a background in cultural studies, the internet industry, and interaction design. His main passion is to bring people he designs for into design and innovation processes, using visual storytelling, which he has done across sectors and industries, from healthcare to transport and communication for companies like Nokia, Philips and Google, as well as the Dutch Government and the National Health Service in the UK. He holds a PhD in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art in London. He is also Reader in Strategic Creativity at Design Academy Eindhoven, where he led the Creative Industry Scientific Programme (CRISP) between 2011-2015. He founded the global design research network Reach in 2008.

Shaowen Bardzell is an Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University and an Affiliated Faculty of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. Bardzell’s research explores the contributions of design, feminism, and social science to support technology’s role in social change. Recent research foci have included criticality in design, care ethics and feminist utopian perspectives on IT, and culture and creative industries in Asia. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Intel Corporation. Bardzell is on the editorial board of the journal Interacting with Computers and Journal of Peer Production. She is the co-author of Humanistic HCI (Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2015) and a co-editor of Critical Theory and Interaction Design (MIT Press, in press). She co-directs the Cultural Research in Technology (CRIT) Lab at Indiana University.

Dr. Ingrid Burkett is Associate Director at The Australian Centre for Social Innovation. She is a social designer, designing and co-designing processes, products and knowledge that deepen social impact and facilitate social innovation. She has contributed to the design of services, policy and processes in a diversity of fields, including frontline social, health and disability services, community development, local economic development, social investment, social enterprise and social procurement. Ingrid is also Social Design Fellow at the Centre for Social Impact, at the University of NSW in Sydney and the University of Western Australia in Perth. Ingrid is a trained graphic designer, and also has qualifications in social work, business and economics.  Her work integrates all these disciplines. Currently she is leading work at TACSI focused on disability, ageing and child protection.  This work ranges from service design, to co-designing innovative solutions, business model design and systems redesign.

Rachel Clarke is a Research Associate at Open Lab, Newcastle University. Her research focuses on socially engaged arts and relational approaches in the design of technology and its associated practices. She gained her PhD in 2014, for long-term participatory research with an international women’s centre in the UK. The research explored sensitivities of design for digital representation in the context of negotiating familial, national and international archives with a community of black, Asian, minority ethnic and refugee women gaining skills, employment and therapeutic care at the Centre. More recently Rachel has worked to scale up participatory approaches for urban transport development with diverse older adults and local authorities. She has published, presented and exhibited internationally across HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and design research journals and conferences.

Fumiko Ichikawa has received her Masters degree in Human Computer Interaction from Keio University. In her commercial career, she has worked with many leading companies and design offices, where she took lead in global design research based in Finland, China, and Japan. After the financial crisis and the great earthquake that took place in Northern Japan in 2011, Fumiko co-founded a company Re:public, Inc together with Hiroshi, Tamura. Together with national and regional governments, companies of all sizes, and educational institutes, her mission is to empower individuals and develop innovation platforms for the better future. Fumiko is a member of Reach, the global design research network, and a founding director of Innovators 100, an innovation program commissioned by Hiroshima prefecture. She also organizes a Serial Innovators consortium, an alliance where she studies how innovators create and deliver breakthrough innovations.

Taiei is a product design engineer, leading Proximity Designs’ design and development of low-cost high-impact products for smallholder Myanmar farmers. Trained at Stanford’s d.school, Taiei is passionate about applying design while embedded in the local context of end users. His all-Myanmar team has brought multiple novel products to market over the last 8 years. The team is engaged in the complete product design process, beginning with empathy building and needfinding, product design and development, co-design with customers, all the way to design for manufacturability. Most recently Taiei has been working on Proximity’s digital initiatives, designing new services and communication channels to meet the changing needs of Myanmar farmers. Taiei grew up in Japan and the US, loves biking and skiing, and is always on the lookout for delicious foods to eat.

Dr. Joon Sang Baek is an assistant professor in the School of Design and Human Engineering at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST). His research areas include design for social innovation, sociotechnical systems design, sustainable design, and nature-inspired design. His current research focuses on systems design for social changes. He received his PhD at Politecnico di Milano with a dissertation on the design for grassroots social innovations empowered by information communication technologies. Before joining UNIST, he worked as a user experience designer at Samsung Mobile, a visiting researcher at the Center for Appropriate Technologies in Vienna and the Hope Institute (a social innovation think tank) in Seoul.

Dr Yanki LEE is a design researcher and social innovator. In 2013, she founded the HKDI DESIS Lab for Social Design Research at the Hong Kong Design Institute (HKDI) researching global social issues through design innovation. She graduated with an MA in Architecture from the Royal College of Art (RCA) and worked at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design (HHCD) as an Inclusive Design Research Fellow since 2000.  After gain her PhD in Design on Participation, she co-founded EXHIBIT at Golden Lane Estate CIC, a social enterprise in London curating social projects to enable individuals or organisations to develop their ingenuity for social innovation. In 2011, she was awarded the fellow of excellence of UK- China Fellowship as visiting scholar of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and in 2012, she was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 2012 for her contribution to design research.

Ann Light is Professor of Design and Creative Technology and leads the Creative Technology Research Group at the University of Sussex. She is a design researcher specializing in design for social change, social wellbeing and the politics of participation. With qualifications in humanities, arts, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, she draws on many influences, having worked with grass-roots organizations and marginalized groups on five continents, in local, transnational and international development settings. She has led interdisciplinary research spanning transport, architecture, social activism and ethically-sourced consumption, drawing on management and facilitation experience acquired with design company start-ups. She is exploring how local cultures support social innovation in a study of Design for Sharing. She publishes on design of social process, citizen innovation and cross-cultural methodology, with a particular interest in holding a space for values to evolve as digital infrastructure develops. She is co-author and technical editor of ‘Designing Connected Products: UX for the Consumer Internet of Things’.

Dr. Miaosen Gong is an Associate Professor of School of Design, Jiangnan University, where he is also founder and coordinator of DESIS Lab-JU. He is the co-coordinator of DESIS-China network (The Network on Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability in China) and member of international coordination committee of DESIS association. His research interests focus on strategic design for sustainability and service design for social innovation, particularly, in the fields of food and agriculture, EV mobility, active welfare and smart healthcare. In last years, he has been in charge of a number of government funded projects and international research collaboration on related topics. He has more than 30 peer-reviewed academic publications in international conferences and journals. Before, he obtained his PhD degree in design at Politecnico di Milano in 2010 and was a visiting scholar at MEL-Design Lab, MIT in 2009, visiting fellow in HKDI (2011) and visiting scholar in Tu/e (2012/13)

Andrea Siodmok is the Head of the Policy Lab in the Cabinet Office. She is both a practitioner and design thinker with an international reputation for applying design for public good. Formerly Chief Design Officer at the Design Council, she is currently head of the UK Government’s Policy Lab and a Deputy Director at the Cabinet Office. She is passionate about expanding the boundaries of design practice. From the earliest days of her career at BT’s Adastral Park Labs, through to her more recent Policy Lab projects, her work demonstrates practical ways to improve peoples’ lives using design principles and practice. Her work with Cabinet Office spans all areas of government with current Lab projects focused on policing, employment, business growth as well as a range of social and family policy issues.

Dr. Alison Prendiville is a Reader at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Her research interests include anthropology and design of service in public and third sector organisations, particularly in the areas of health and social care. She has recently completed as Co-Investigator, the AHRC funded research Mapping and Developing Service Design Research in the UK and the DeSID (Design for Service Innovation and Development ) project. Currently she is working as Co-Investigator on the AHRC funded Public Collaboration Lab with Central St Martins and Camden Council. She has considerable experience running workshops both nationally and internationally. She is also a regular contributor to Ordnance Survery’s Geovation Challenge as a judge, to evaluate the use of OS open data in the creation of socially driven location specific services. She has an MA (RCA) in Design Management and an MSc in Digital Anthropology from UCL.

Viria Vichit-Vadakan serves as the Director of New Business Development for Learn Education—a leading edtech social enterprise in Asia. She leads the company’s new business unit—serving as a research and innovation arm to create learning products for K-12 students in all types of schools throughout Thailand and the region. 

Prior to Learn Education, Viria helped establish the Bachelor of Arts program in Global Studies and Social Entrepreneurship (GSSE) and a social innovation lab “G-Lab” at the School of Global Studies, Thammasat University, Thailand (www.sgs.tu.ac.th).  As a Founder and former Director of G-Lab, she managed social impact projects including: working with an edtech startup to scale its technology to reach 50 schools and implemented an accelerator for 100 emerging social entrepreneurs to scale their social enterprises in areas of education, health, agriculture, and community based tourism in partnership with JP Morgan Global Philanthropy.  Prior to G-Lab, she worked at Ashoka and IDEO.org.  Viria received graduate training in human-centered design from the Stanford Design Institute (d.school).  At Stanford she was a teaching assistant for 2 years for the social entrepreneurship course.  Viria was named Global Shapers by the world economic forum in 2015. She is interested in working with organizations, both public and private, to greater their social impact/ innovation, and improving the quality of education in Thailand and the region at large.

Joyce Yee is Professor of Design and Social Innovation at Northumbria School of Design, UK. Joyce’s research explores how design is used to support, enable and drive change through the creation of innovative practices in organisations. She co-founded the Designing Social Innovation in Asia-Pacific network (www.desiap.org) in 2015 with Dr Yoko Akama, RMIT in Australia, as a peer learning network for social innovation practitioners using design. She is passionate about design for social good and advocates for culturally diverse and locally relevant practices that challenge the dominant industrialized and western-centric models of design.

Robert (Bob) Young is Professor of Design Practice and Research Lead in the School of Design at Northumbria University, head of its ‘Design-led innovation practices and research methods’ research group. He began the first doctoral studies in the School and has assisted twenty-seven candidates to gain their PhDs. The last six of these have all concerned building knowledge for service design and social innovation.   He has advised two previous UK Design Council, Design of the Times programmes in the North East of England (2007) and Cornwall (2010) on social innovation and service design projects with communities of practice. He recently served on the Scientific Advisory Board for The Netherland’s Creative Industries Science Programme (CRISP) on product service system design. He has partnered two recent AHRC Networks; Design Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) UK, and; Service Design Research and is Coordinator of the Northumbria DESIS Lab, which undertakes collaborative social innovation learning projects with public and third sector organisations.