co-chair

Richard Dalton has been involved in design ever since he graduated from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK in 1994 with a degree in Software Engineering that he didn’t know what to do with. In 1999, two web-design startups in the UK later, he moved to the United States. He has been leading design […]

Samantha Starmer is an experience design and strategy executive who has over 20 years of experience in leading innovation and digital transformation at companies such as Capital One, Ralph Lauren, Sapient Razorfish, REI, Microsoft and Amazon. Throughout her career, Samantha has led human centered design thinking efforts, and has been responsible for the ideation, requirements, design […]

Jess McMullin is the founder of Situ Strategy, a human-centred management consultancy, and the Centre for Citizen Experience, an action, education, and advocacy initiative that helps the public sector work better for people. He has worked in design and user experience since 1996, and is active in the user experience, design and innovation communities having […]

Aaron “Ron” Irizarry is the Head of Design for Commercial Card & Experience Infrastructure at Capital One, and is also co-author of Discussing Design: Improving Communication and Collaboration Through Critique. Beside his passion for building and mentoring teams, it is also important to know that Aaron is a master of the BBQ Arts, lifelong Dodgers fan, and heavy metal […]

Mike Atherton is a content strategist, information architect, UX consultant, instructor, keynote speaker, and digital transformationist. He has 20 years’ experience delivering multi-channel user experiences for major blue chip clients and public sector bodies. He is currently a content strategist at Facebook London.

Veronica Erb researches, designs, and illustrates. Plays ukulele and edits Wikipedia. Loves being dyslexic. She currently works at NPR Digital Media Design, where she leads research and contribute design to digital environments on national platforms.

Lou Rosenfeld is Rosenfeld Media’s founder and publisher. Like many user experience folk, Lou started somewhere (library science), made his way somewhere else (information architecture, then user experience), and has ended up in an entirely different place (publishing). Lou spent most of his career in information architecture consulting, first as founder of Argus Associates and […]

Samantha Bailey has been leading user-experience projects, directing teams and guiding professionals in their career development for over fifteen years. She has experience managing interdisciplinary teams at Thomson West, Wachovia and Argus Associates. She is currently Senior Director of User Experience at Merrill Corporation, and taught at Kent State University.

Christina Wodtke is an author, professor and speaker who teaches techniques to create high performing teams. She trains companies to move from insight to execution as principal of her firm, Wodtke Consulting, and teaches the next generation of entrepreneurs at California College of the Arts and Stanford Continuing Education. Her books include Information Architecture: Blueprints for […]

Dalia Levine​ is the ontologist at HBO. Her focus is creating consistency in metadata across the enterprise. She works on classifying information across multiple sources, documents, and media. She contributes to and incorporates international standards to streamline workflow and capture knowledge. When she organizes information, she helps to get the computer to understand what you […]

Livia Labate is a user experience manager with 20-years of experience in digital product design working for companies like the BBC, Comcast and Marriott. Recently, Livia took a break from a fruitful career as a design manager to spend a year as a Knight-Mozilla Fellow at NPR working on open-source tools for journalism, followed by the […]