Speakers

Gavin Strange is a senior creative at Aardman Animations, the Academy Award-winning studio behind Shaun the Sheep and Wallace & Gromit. He is a believer in creative side projects and, by night, develops his own under the JamFactory moniker. He is a speaker on the global circuit including OFFF, FITC and Wired: Next Generation. He took an unconventional route to get to where he is and urges young people to find a fulfilling vocation, to be stimulated and inspired every day. Gavin lives in Bristol, England with his wife and their greyhound Arnie.

Vibha is a design lead at Airbnb where she focuses on building tools for hosts. Over the last 4 years she has worked on Review systems – which allow a guest to review their stay, Check-in guides – which give hosts a a visual tool to enter their home and Host generated guidebooks – which capture the best of a host’s neighborhood and city knowledge. Prior to Airbnb she worked at Wikipedia – building their first ever mobile apps. She is passionate about type and calligraphy, and often conducts lettering workshops for enthusiastic students back in India.

Stephanie is a Program Manager and Designer Developer for Microsoft Edge Developer Experiences and webhint.io. Her design work is focused on improving the tools developers use to build the web. Before Microsoft, Stephanie worked in-house at an agency crafting digital experiences for various American corporate clients. In her free time she runs a lifestyle blog, The Hermes Homestead, and explores the Pacific Northwest in a school bus her husband converted to a camper.

Santini is a design strategist, exploring the crossover between design and futures approaches. He is a Glasgow School of Art alumnus, and has spent time working on a range of speculative design, participatory design, and strategic foresight projects, living in Philadelphia, Amsterdam, and Glasgow. In 2016 he founded Andthen, a design strategy consultancy based in Glasgow whose approach blends design research with futures thinking. Since then, he has worked with a range of organisations across sectors including finance, education, retail, urban planning, and mental health. Outside of his practice at Andthen, he also teaches as a visiting lecturer at The Glasgow School of Art’s Innovation School.

Hazel is a UX Designer at the BBC and has spent the last year designing experiences kids love to use on new technology like Voice and Augmented Reality. She also uses her role to inspire the next generation of Design Thinkers and UXers by regularly running design sessions with teenagers, as well as being a mentor with Innovate Her.

Helle is UX Lead and Team director at Creuna Denmark where she is working with digital customer experience for some of Denmark’s largest brands whether it is selling electrical sockets and wind turbines or creating an upscale digital cheese shop experience. Helping customers reach a new level of digital excellence is what drives her, as well as the magic that happens when a team is in (almost) perfect sync.

She has strong Power Point game, no fancy art direction needed. Her weak point is knowing the difference between Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman when they are not lined up next to each other.

Managing Director and co-founder of Primate. 15 years experience. Passionate about digital and business transformation. Indifferent towards monkeys.

Mark is currently UX Lead at Thomas Cook Airlines, Manchester. Working in cross-function Agile product teams, Mark and his team have focused the last 18 months on nurturing a healthy environment for good design practices whilst fostering a culture of innovation in an Agile environment.

Since building his first website nearly 2 decades ago, Mark has been on a continuous journey of discovery by asking the big “Why?” question in the field of Product Design. A keen UX and Agile enthusiast, he has been working on forming the glue between these two often opposing workflows.

Over the last 15 years Mark has worked on various UX projects for organisations such as Sky, General Electric, Thomas Cook, MTV, Holland and Barrett, Nokia and Molson Coors.

Andrew Purnell is a Design Manager at FanDuel, based in Glasgow. With over 15 years’ experience in the design industry, he has worked with silicon valley tech start-ups, leading UK design agencies and national public sector bodies. At FanDuel his role has a central focus on crafting beautiful and useful experiences for people using FanDuel products, solving large scale problems through design and ensuring that UX and Design is always part of the conversation.

Daniel Duke is the company’s head of marketing. He joined the team in 2017 where his past experience in design, UX and content strategy provided him with a holistic understanding of Sketch and its customers. Daniel has spent the last two years honing and developing Sketch’s unique approach to selling a product.

Chris Downer is the Mac design lead at Sketch. He joined the team when Sketch was still in its infancy and has spent the last six years spearheading design efforts across the Mac app and throughout the company as a whole. Chris’ attention to detail and broad UX knowledge are invaluable skills for his role in “designing for designers”.

A designer, writer and speaker based in Belfast, Christopher mentors purpose-driven businesses, helping them to launch and thrive. He encourages small businesses to think big and he enables big businesses to think small.

The author of numerous books, he is currently hard at work on his eighth, ‘Designing Delightful Experiences’, for Smashing Magazine and ninth, ‘Building Beautiful UIs’, for Adobe. Both are accompanied by a wealth of digital resources, and are drawn from Christopher’s 15+ years of experience as a design educator.

As a design strategist he has worked with companies, large and small, to help drive innovation, drawing on his 25+ years of experience working with clients including: Adobe, EA and the BBC.