Rahim is an award-winning designer who initially studied Industrial Design at Carleton University and, following his graduation, moved to San Francisco, California in 2011. He pursued an MBA in Design Strategy from the California College of the Arts and had the opportunity to work for companies like Umbra, Teknion, California Innovations, Fuseproject, Samsung & Code & Theory as a Design Strategist, UX Designer and Design Researcher. Rahim also ran his start-up called Story Jar in San Francisco and was accepted into an incubator. On the side, he runs a small studio called Arabesque Studios that focuses on designing products inspired by Islamic Geometry. He loves creative problem solving and is looking forward to teaching and helping you reach your personal design goals.

Carmen has been a designer, researcher and teacher for more than a decade. He has achieved degrees in computer science and management science at Ryerson University and then went on to obtain his PhD in Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. His PhD thesis entitled The Vibrochord – Investigating a Vibrotactile Instrument, explored the design, creation and use of the world’s first digital, fully vibrotactile musical instrument. Carmen went on to become a Professor at Centennial College where he led several applied research projects including MagnusMode and a Mixed Reality Mobile Game. He then left the world of academia and went into the financial industry to design online and mobile user experiences for CIBC and RBC. After starting and leading a small prototyping team at RBC Carmen left to establish the design practice at a small company based in Markham called Orbit Group.

Melanie started her research career in academia. She worked in various Psychology and Neuroscience labs while completing her Psychology Undergraduate Degree at Western University. While studying psychology she was interested in the relationship humans have with technology, which led her to pursue a Masters Degree in Human-Computer Interaction at Carleton University. Melanie has had experience conducting human factors research for flight simulators and researching the relationship between human perception and virtual reality. She’s spent the past 4 years working in consumer technology and is currently a User Experience Researcher at Shopify.

Philippe is a Product Designer and Design Educator based in Toronto, Canada. This hybrid role is a reflection of Philippe’s belief in the importance of bridging the gap between design academia and industry. As a Sr. Product Designer at Shopify Plus, Philippe helps to define problems, interpret product requirements, and understand the needs of users. Day to day, Philippe diverges and then converges solutions through a process of ideation, prototyping, and testing. By working collaboratively with cross-functional teams, such as product management and software engineers, Philippe discovers and clarifies the what and the why of products while leveraging expertise in user experience, visual design, and product strategy to define the how.

As a Design Educator, Philippe aims to activate creativity and to foster critical thinking and strong decision making from students within their academic projects. As such, by emphasizing outcome over output, Philippe intends to apply a holistic design education to ultimately shape designers with a strong, personal voice and who can potentially provide leadership in their projects.

For the past 8 years, Alisha has been using research, design and strategy to help some of Canada’s biggest brands in Canada and beyond create experiences that focus on people. Alisha is especially focused on how design thinking can create both social change while having positive impact on business. Today, she is applying her experiences and philosophy to her role as Senior Designer at Shopify. She is also the founder of Side x Side Collective, an organization affecting change within the design industry by providing women, agender, and non-binary designers and technologists with goal-oriented mentorship and support.

Sveta started her design career with a degree in Graphic Design from OCAD University. Early on in her career, she learned about UI and UX design and eventually made a decision to transition to User Experience Design. Throughout her career, Sveta has gained diverse knowledge and hands-on experience with marketing automation, branding, user experience design, product management, and user research. For almost a decade Sveta has been helping companies utilize design thinking and human-centered design process. She has led numerous research initiatives to empower organizations with data and evidence to make business decisions. Sveta is currently working as a Director of UX at Maropost – a marketing automation platform, where she leads a global team of UX designers and researchers.

Over the past 20+ years, Luis has worked with both public entities and private organizations. He’s led transformation projects for small and medium size enterprises, as well as multinational organizations, establishing business requirements and overall experience frameworks in order to support their business needs and objectives. He has experience with both User Experience strategy and production; he specializes in Design Thinking and Human-Centred Design and has created prototypes for multiple platforms. He has also designed appropriate research methodologies to gather user feedback. As a facilitator, Luis has managed executive teams and guided cross-disciplinary business units through co-creation and the Agile development methodology.

Mark Farmer is a digital communications professional with over 15 years’ experience working for non-profits and commercial enterprises, one-person shops and large multinational corporations in Canada and abroad. He specializes in digital strategy, social media, accessibility and user experience design. Mr. Farmer started in web design and development in the late ‘90s with TransCanada PipeLines, and founded his own shop, webness, in 2001. He spent five years as webmaster and then creative director for Earth Day Canada, before shifting to digital communications for organizations such as the Royal Ontario Museum, Intuit’s Global Business Division and York University. Currently he is the senior digital strategist at the Ontario College of Teachers. Mr. Farmer is the founder of the Toronto Museums & Culture Online Collective, co-founder of Social Media Café Toronto, and is a regular presenter at industry events and at colleges and universities around Toronto.

Joselynn Maas has over 20 years of experience in strategic thinking, problem solving and experience design. Her career has been split between working in design roles for tech startups and corporations and also as an entrepreneur running her own branding consultancy. But one thing has always remained constant: her focus on the end experience for her customer and the consumer. Joselynn’s idea-centric approach has also allowed her to expand her experience across many industry sectors such as Technology, Retail, Hospitality, Luxury Goods, Consumer Goods, Grocery, and Not for Profit. She has managed teams at her own agency and within corporate environments and always ensures she has an active voice with management.

Most recently, Joselynn has been leading and revamping the user experience strategy for Canada’s original online grocery delivery service, Grocery Gateway. As lead UX Strategy & Design, she is hands-on with ethnographic research, developing the UX roadmap alongside the product manager and constantly iterating and improving the user experience through an agile sprint model. In addition to long-standing employment and successful client relationships, Joselynn recently mentored a Humber College team who won an award for their work on Grocery Gateway at Amsterdam’s UX Insight awards. Her design work also been featured in En Route magazine, The National Post, the Globe and Mail, the SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) and AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario).

Professor Norwood’s research interests include information visualization, social and cultural aspects of wayfinding, design epistemologies, and the ethics of design education.

Leah Pollock is currently a Lead RnD Recruiter at Shopify in Toronto with a specific focus on hiring top talent in UX roles. After joining Shopify in 2016, Leah started working closely with the senior UX team to identify skills gaps at the company as well as some of the most pressing UX challenges Shopify was facing. From there Leah started to engage the greater UX community in Toronto and beyond and helped double the size of the Toronto UX team, increasing gender diversity by 50%.

Before joining Shopify, Leah worked at several nonprofits for the better part of a decade where her accomplishments included developing a microfinance program for social enterprises, fundraising $4.3M in Community Bond sales for the Centre for Social Innovation, and building an accelerator program for entrepreneurs focused on solving social and environmental challenges. Leah is currently on maternity leave with her baby June and loves talking about UX when she’s not pushing a stroller around High Park and Roncesvalles.

Sean Seaman is an Experience Design practitioner consulting with businesses, organizations and individuals, reimagining digital solutions that customers and businesses are facing. Presently, he manages Experience Design at Avanade Digital Innovation Studio, providing thought leadership in design sprints for enterprise clients. In addition, Sean gets great satisfaction in facilitating design thinking workshops with clients, helping them arrive at human-centric design solutions on their own. Sean has 18+ years experience in Experience Design practice, providing design direction and consultation for Fortune 500 companies. He has extensive experience in the Fin-tech, Retail, Transportation sectors, previously working with digital design agencies, major retailers and SAAS companies. 

Chrissy is an experienced and highly collaborative UX/UI designer who focuses on researching and understanding the intricacy of user needs and translating them into design solutions that drive business results. Her skills, education and expertise make her highly effective in moving designs from initial concept development through to research, prototyping, usability testing and into the creation of fully developed products, design languages and design systems. She is currently the product designer for all new and several existing verticals at ratehub.ca and over the last 4 years has helped to launch several new products to effectively expand and grow the business into all areas of personal finance.
 
She is also currently in charge of building and scaling a new design system and executing on all areas of rebranding efforts. Chrissy holds a Bachelor of Design degree from OCAD University, and has taken several post-grad certificates in in user experience design from Bitmaker, HackerYou and The Interaction Design Foundation.

Borzu Talaie is an award-winning designer and educator who has worked in the design field since 1993. His area of practice ranges from branding and print design to interaction design, information design and interactive installations. He received his Master of Design degree in data visualization and visual analytics in 2014 from the Digital Futures program at OCAD University. Borzu is the founder of Borxu Design, a multi-disciplinary studio where entrepreneurs, designers, and engineers continually examine the intersection of business and communication design to deliver unique solutions to their data-driven projects. Borxu Design clientele include large-scale construction companies, media companies, and startups based in the Greater Toronto Area.

Mike is currently a Principal User Experience Designer at Oracle. In this role, he creates exceptional experiences for intelligent applications. Previously Mike spent over 10 years at IBM where he worked with Watson, designing experiences for a variety of offerings within Watson Customer Engagement.