The “Conference with
a heart” is heartbroken

Monika Jiang is a writer and community builder with Chinese and German-Jewish roots, shifting the narrative around loneliness—from something to fix or hide, to something deeply human we all experience.

Through The Oneliness Project, she creates shared spaces and conversations that cultivate awareness, deeper inquiry, and a path into care, community, and reconnection with ourselves, each other, and the world—in oneliness.

She is a TEDx speaker and an emerging voice at global gatherings like Future Days, Unfinished Festival, Society5.0 Festival, and others. 
With a focus on community care, Monika brings people together around urgent themes of our time—AI and intimacy, urban design and third places, modern love, our relationship to the natural world, and the deeper threads connecting them to a sense of belonging.

Her approach blends systems thinking and cultural inquiry with embodiment, play, deep listening, and practices rooted in the Zen Buddhist tradition of Plum Village and the teachings of Thích Nhất Hạnh.
 
Monika holds a background in media and communications, branding, and cultural strategy, with ten years of experience, predominantly working across Europe and North America—from supporting global youth initiatives in food and agriculture with the Thought For Food Foundation to playing a key role in growing and leading the global platform and community of House of Beautiful Business, a 50,000-strong network and consulting agency shaping a more life-centered economy.

Today, she combines this experience with her practice in facilitation, writing, and community building, creating spaces and conversations that explore how we reconnect with ourselves, each other, and the world.

A visionary design leader, is the driving force behind Ather Energy’s design revolution. As Head
of Design, he masterminds the creation of every facet of the electric scooter ecosystem, from
sleek vehicles to intuitive apps.

Bikash’s journey, ignited by a passion for design during his automotive engineering studies, has seen him evolve from an intern in the early days to a pivotal architect of India’s electric mobility landscape.

His innovative spirit and unwavering
commitment to crafting magical experiences have established Ather as a design-centric pioneer,
inspiring countless designers and engineers to push the boundaries of electric transportation.

With a proven track record of transforming concepts into reality, Bikash’s leadership has been
instrumental in developing groundbreaking products across the categories.

His design philosophy is at the core of Ather’s success, making him a true industry luminary.

Tey Bannerman translates between technology’s promise and implementation reality.

From digital studios to startups to Partner at McKinsey Europe, his path spans software engineering, product design, and AI transformation across five continents.

He’s led AI implementations for organisations from global banks to retail giants – learning what separates the 5% that succeed from the 95% that fail.

His approach combines technical depth with a focus on cultural intelligence, trust calibration, and human-centred design.

Today, as an independent advisor, he helps organisations navigate their biggest challenges: the messy realities of integrating AI with human behaviour and organisational constraints.

Kimya Gandhi is a type designer from Mumbai, currently living in Berlin. Specialising in designing Devanagari typefaces, Kimya draws her inspiration from India’s rich and diverse visual landscape and hopes to create new and innovative designs for Indic scripts.

Kimya is a partner at the type foundry Mota Italic where she along with Rob Keller designs custom and retail typefaces for clients from various parts of the world.

Mota Italic has catered to a range of clients like Škoda, Audi, Google, Apple, to name a few. When not drawing typefaces she spends her time teaching, or conducting workshops on typography and type design.

Kimya believes there is great potential to reinvent vernacular typography in India and encourage a new generation of contemporary type design. When not designing typefaces she spends her time teaching, or making homemade pasta!

Payal Arora is a Professor at Utrecht University and founder of the Inclusive AI Lab.

She is an acclaimed digital anthropologist, with two decades of user-experiences in the Global South. She is an award-winning author of several books including “The Next Billion Users(Harvard) and ‘From Pessimism to Promise’ (MIT).

She has been listed in the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics 2025 and won the 2025 Women in AI Benelux Award for her work on Diversifying AI. Forbes called her the ‘next billion champion’ and the ‘right kind of person to reform tech.’

200+ international media outlets have covered her work including the Financial Times, Wired, and The Economist.

She has consulted for the public and the private sector including UNHCR, Spotify, KPMG, Adobe, IDEO, Google, and GE and sits on several boards including for UN EGOV, and LIRNE-Asia.

She has given 350+ keynotes and invited talks in 85 countries for events such as Copenhagen Tech Festival, re:publica, and COP26, and TEDx talks on the future of the internet and innovation.

She is a Harvard and Columbia University, and Rockefeller Bellagio Resident Fellow alumni, and currently lives in Amsterdam.

From enhancing Google Maps and generating over $90 million in tax refunds in the US, to championing global land restoration — Lauren Celenza has turned complex systems into stories that move people and money. Her work at Google, Adobe, Code for America, and The World Resources Institute has made invisible things visible.

She now writes Tech Without Losing Your Soul, a sharp, personal newsletter on tech’s influence on daily life, burnout, and our evolving relationship with AI.

At DesignUp 2025, Lauren speaks to designers caught in the AI churn—those wondering where their value lies when machines can generate faster than we can think.

Janaki Kumar has spent her career shaping design at the heart of complex systems—enterprise tech, global banking, and beyond.

As Chief Design Officer for Global Banking at JPMorgan Chase, she leads design across one of the world’s largest financial institutions. Previously, she built SAP’s Design and Co-Innovation Center, co-authored Gamification at Work, and racked up 20+ patents. Whether teaching at Stanford or speaking at TEDx, Janaki brings a sharp lens to design’s evolving role in business and society.

As creativity becomes less scarce, designers must shift from output to orchestration—and evolve from crafts people to catalysts in this new economy of intelligence.

Catalina Estrada’s work travels far—from collaborations with brands like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and UNICEF to public art campaigns across Latin America. But what sets her apart isn’t scale—it’s intention.

Rooted in Colombia and based in Barcelona, she uses illustration and pattern design to carry voices that are often left out: Indigenous communities in the Amazon, women affected by gender violence in Mexico, children learning through poetry in remote classrooms. Her visuals aren’t just beautiful—they’re bridges.

At DesignUp 2025, Catalina shares how design, even at its quietest, can create visibility, restore dignity, and reconnect us to the people and places that systems often overlook.

Guang Yang is a design expert at Diconium (Volkswagen Group IT) with global experience at Lenovo, Samsung, and Thalia.

Trained in industrial design, he researches EU-China consumer behavior, HMI, UX, and software-defined vehicles, focusing on how cultural, social, and digital factors shape user needs and cross-market automotive experiences.

Marc Stickdorn is a passionate advocate for Service Design, Journey Management, and Human-centered Design. He is a main author of widely acclaimed and award-winning CX and design books, including This is Service Design Thinking and This is Service Design Doing, both of which are used by professionals and educators around the globe. In addition to writing, he lectures at universities, contributes to academic research, and leads executive programs that help organizations internalize Service Design and Journey Management as a strategic capability. Marc completed a PhD in design science, focusing on CX research for customer journeys.

As the founder and CEO of Smaply, he helped shape the market for journey mapping and management software, pioneering the category in 2012 and setting the standard for how organizations visualize and manage experiences at scale. A leading voice in Journey Management, Marc has been delivering dedicated training on the topic for over a decade, equipping organizations with the mindsets, methods, and tools to embed customer and employee experience (CX/EX) into daily operations. He supports teams in building human-centric information systems that bridge silos and bring coherence to complex service ecosystems.

Based in Innsbruck, Austria, Marc balances life in the Alps with travel, time with his family, and a quest for great coffee. Known for his approachable style and practical expertise, he is a sought-after keynote speaker, advisor, and trainer on all things Service Design and Journey Management.

Combining two decades of experience in Tech with academic foundations in literature, cultural anthropology, and systemic design, Hertje has held roles such as Head of Product Design at Zalando and Lead UX Designer at AKQA.

A creative problem solver with a human-centred mindset, a designer’s toolbox, and a systems-thinking approach, she has a soft spot for working on messy problems that don’t fit into neat boxes.

Her talks focus on the paradox of human-centred mindsets within growth-focused environments and explore the system dynamics shaping how we work.

Anijo Mathew is Dean and Professor at the Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech in Chicago. His research evaluates new models of innovation enabled by technology and media convergence through the lenses of design-driven leadership and entrepreneurship. He works with global organizations to adapt and change strategic responses to transforming technologies.
 
Anijo is the founder and board member of Vamonde, a Chicago storytelling app operating worldwide and named by Built in Chicago as one of six Chicago startups shaping the future of virtual reality.
 
Anijo holds a PhD in Design Computing from The Open University in the United Kingdom, a Master in Design Studies from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and a professional Bachelor of Architecture from Birla Institute of Technology Mesra in Ranchi, India. He has taught at Harvard University’s School of Business, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Illinois Tech’s Stuart School of Business. Anijo served as Head of Department of Art and Design at the College of

Katja Forbes is a fearless CX innovator and award-winning leader who consistently challenges the boundaries of customer experience and AI. 

Named one of Westpac/AFR’s “100 Women of Influence” and ranked among CX Network’s Top 20 CX Leaders in AI and Financial Services, she boldly transforms traditional corporate cultures into dynamic, client-centric powerhouses.

As an Executive Director at a Global Financial Services firm, Katja expertly blends human-centered design with cutting-edge technology, establishing her organisation as a global thought leader.

An outspoken advocate for women in leadership, her compelling voice, sharp insights, and magnetic on-camera presence make her an industry standout.

Ben Sauer is a product and design leader, author, and speaker. He worked at Clearleft and Babylon Health, and advised organisations like the BBC, Pearson, Tesco, and TCS in how to raise their product game.

His most recent book is Death by Screens: how to present high-stakes digital design work and live to tell the tale, and he’s trained designers around the world in methods from the book.

Teams at Amazon and the BBC have used his methods of conversation design, and through O’Reilly, he’s trained folks at NASA.

On the web bensauer.net

Daniel Burka is a product manager and designer who focuses on solving complex global health problems in simple ways. He is the co-founder of Hard Problems — a not-for-profit that helps technologists to apply their skills to real problems like climate change and public health.

Daniel is also the founder of the open source project, Simple (simple.org). Simple is used by thousands of hospitals in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia to manage over 6 million patients with hypertension and diabetes.

In 2021, Daniel founded the open source project Healthicons.org to provide free icons to healthcare projects around the world.

Previously, Daniel worked in Silicon Valley. He was a design partner at Google Ventures for 5 years and helped write the book Sprint. He was early at several startups including Digg, Pownce, Milk (sold to Google), and Tiny Speck (became Slack). He co-founded the Canadian design agency silverorange, which is now over 25 years old.

Elyce is co-founder of Hard Problems. She is an organisational psychologist and social researcher who supports multidisciplinary teams working on complex challenges in public health, technology, and health and social care.

Previously, Elyce worked as a senior researcher-consultant designing and evaluating large-scale organisational change programmes. This included leading the largest global study on neurodiversity in the tech industry from a social model perspective; supporting regional and national boards – bringing together healthcare, social care, public health, and grassroots organisations—to develop more integrated, place-based systems to address gambling-related harms; and supporting the scaling of an innovative community health service pilot for people living with chronic pain in South London.

Earlier in her career, she worked in leadership development and organisational culture change for Fortune 500 healthcare, biopharmaceutical, technology, and finance companies.

Her work is driven by a commitment to understanding how organisational design and power dynamics shape—and often undermine—the creation of more effective, equitable, and humane organisations.

Gerry Scullion is one of the most influential voices in human-centered design today. As founder of The Human Centered Design Network, he built the world’s number-one Human Centered Design podcast — downloaded over 1.7million times and heard in more than 140 countries — and transformed it into a thriving global community of designers, changemakers, and leaders committed to putting people first.
‍
His forthcoming book, This is Human Centered Design, published by BIS Publishers, distils over two decades of frontline practice into a definitive guide for anyone serious about designing services and experiences that truly work for people.

He also contributed to the landmark This is Service Design Doing (O’Reilly, 2018), authoring chapters on effective prototyping and embedding service design teams within organisations, alongside 200 of the world’s leading service designers.

He is the creator of the Service Design for Executives course on Pluralsight, bringing design leadership thinking to a corporate audience.

Amit Patel is a Toronto-born Creative Director, design consultant, and design educator based in London, United Kingdom. With over two decades of experience in design and technology, he has held roles in product management and product design across various industries, from startups in media, fintech, and healthcare to leading global companies.

As the Founder and Creative Director of Experience Haus, a design education consultancy located in Shoreditch, London, Amit offers courses and workshops covering UX Design, Product Design, Product Management, User Research, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship. His commitment to design education extends to facilitating workshops for leading organisations such as Spotify, PwC, BNY Mellon, Bayer Pharmaceuticals, The Economist, and the World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator.

Amit is also a sought-after speaker and guest lecturer, having presented at institutions including London Business School, Queen Mary University of London, The Dubai Institute for Design and Innovation, Oslo Metropolitan University, and Westminster University. Beyond his professional endeavors, he is dedicated to mentoring the next generation of designers and entrepreneurs, providing career guidance and venture building insights.

CEO & Founder of MadHatter Studios and AI Film Fest Amsterdam. Asad is a musician, writer, creative technologist, entrepreneur, World Economic Forum Global Shaper, and a filmmaker of 15 years.

His company, MadHatter, has been at the forefront of the AI filmmaking revolution; notable clients include Luma, Google, Subway, and Dunkin’.

AI Film Fest Amsterdam was the first full-fledged AI film festival in the world, and since 2022, it has expanded internationally, hosting trainings and events in Dubai, Milan, Riyadh, Warsaw, Berlin, Budapest, and Paris.