Kate Armstrong has over 15 years experience in the culture sector with a specific focus on intersections between art and technology. Her interdisciplinary practice is conceptually driven and has included participatory work, objects, photography, video, events in urban space, generative text systems, and experimental narrative forms. As a curator she has produced exhibitions, events and publications in contemporary art and technology in Vancouver and internationally. She foundedUpgrade Vancouver as part of an international network of art and technology organizations in 30 cities, was a founder of the Goethe Satellite, an initiative of the Goethe-Institute that produced ten exhibitions in Vancouver between 2011-2013, and is past President of the board of the Western Front (2007-2014). Armstrong serves on the boards of BC Artscape, Innovation Central Society (ICS), and the New Forms Festival.

Caitlin Chaisson is an artist and writer based in Vancouver, BC. She received a Master’s of Applied Arts at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2016, and holds a BComm with a Minor in Art History from the University of British Columbia. She has exhibited at the Charles H. Scott Gallery (2016), Hyphenated Sites (2016) and Ground Gallery (2015). Her writing has been published in Espace Magazine (Montréal), Breach Magazine (Vancouver), and Decoy Magazine (Vancouver).

Jorge Frascara is Professor Emeritus and former Chairman, Art and Design, University of Alberta; Honorary Professor, Emily Carr University; Fellow, Society of Graphic Designers of Canada; Former-President of Ico-D (International Council of Design); Advisor, Doctorate in Design, IUAV University of Venice, and Editorial Board Member of Visible Language, Design Issues and Information Design Journal. He published more than 90 articles and ten books, the last being Information Design as Principled Action (Common Ground, 2015), and was guest editor of a special issue of Visible Language (49/1-2, 2015) on Design and Health. He was advisor to the International Standards Organization (ISO), the Canadian Standards Association and the Canadian Standards Council on public information symbols. He has been a guest lecturer in 26 countries and has received honors from eight countries for his socially-oriented practice and promotion of communication design. Past clients include the Government of Canada, the Government of Alberta, the Mission Possible Coalition (traffic safety), the Alberta Drug Utilization Program, Alberta Health Services, and the Health Services in Italy. He lives in Edmonton, Canada, consulting on communication design for health and safety.

Lisa H. Grocott is the head of department and Professor of Design at Monash University. Before coming to Monash Lisa spent the past 12 years at Parsons School of Design in New York where she was Dean of Academic Initiatives and core faculty in the Masters of Transdisciplinary Design. Lisa’s research specifically examines the contribution of the people-centred, speculation-driven practice of design in interdisciplinary collaborations. Her collaborations with cognitive psychologists, education researchers and behavioral change experts has been awarded more than $2.5 million in federal funding and applied industry research collaborations. At Monash she has founded WonderLab a co-design research lab that has at its heart a pop-up PhD cohort of researchers operating at the intersection of design, learning and play. Lisa is currently exploring how we shift beliefs and practices through her role as chief investigator of an Australian Research Council grant on Innovative Learning Environments and Teacher Change.

Leah Karlberg is a Bachelors student of Geography at the University of British Columbia and has applied social justice to technical problems in the Bay Area where she worked alongside a neighborhood to design adaptation strategies against various predictions of sea level rise, taking into account the areas specific demographics and collective capacity. She has engaged in project management by developing and implementing a multi-faceted campaign at Vancouver’s Granville Island to address the city’s highest rates of bicycle theft, reducing rates of bicycle theft by 60% by the end of the project.

Stephanie Koenig is a Bachelors student  of Industrial Design at Emily Carr University and has represented North America in the 2017 Schneider Electric Go Green in the City competition. This was both a business and engineering competition, where students were asked to develop proposals for implementing renewable energy systems into future urban environments. She worked collaboratively with a team of community members to create designs for the Local Prosperity Conference in support of local economic development in communities across Nova Scotia.

Laura Kozak is a designer, educator, and organizer. For fifteen years she has built partnerships and collaborated on projects with artists and organizations including Access Gallery, 221A, the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design, the Aboriginal Housing Society, the Vancouver Park Board, and the City of Vancouver. She holds a Master of Advanced Studies in Architecture from UBC (2012) and a BFA from Emily Carr (2005), and currently teaches in the Master of Design program at Emily Carr.

Justin Langlois is an artist, educator, and organizer. He is the co-founder and research director of Broken City Lab, an artist-led collective working to explore the complexities of locality, infrastructures, and participation in relation to civic engagement and social change, and he is the founder of The School for Eventual Vacancy. His practice explores collaborative structures, critical pedagogy, and custodial frameworks as tools for gathering, learning, and making. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Culture + Community and Academic Coordinator of the Imagining Our Future initiative at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Ezio Manzini works in the field of design for social innovation and, on this topic, he started DESIS Network. Presently, he is Distinguished Professor on Design for Social Innovation at Elisava-Design School and Engineering, Barcelona; Honorary Professor at the Politecnico di Milano; and Guest Professor at Tongji University (Shanghai) and Jiangnan University (Wuxi). His most recent book is “Design, When Everybody Designs.
An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation”, MIT Press 2015.

Celeste Martin is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr. She has a background in communication design and specializes in typography and publication design. She has a BFA and MFA from the University of Iowa. Her creative work examines the forms of written language, the shapes of letters and structures of text and their relationship to space. She is an editor of Current, the university’s design research journal, and a member of Emily Carr’s Senate. Her current design research focuses on the development of enhanced interactive ebooks and the categorization of emerging formal structures in book design for touch-based
mobile devices.

Cameron Neat is an Assistant Professor of Communication Design in the Ian Gillespie Faculty of Design and Dynamic Media at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. He holds a MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and has eighteen plus years of professional design experience. His areas of research interest include, typography, visual rhetoric and information design.

Caylee Raber is the Director of the Health Design Lab at Emily Carr University of Art + Design. Within this role, Caylee establishes and leads health design projects that bring together faculty and students with industry and community partners to improve health services and products through a human-centred design approach. This includes collaborations with Vancouver Coastal Health, Providence Health Care, Ministry of Health, Centre for Aging and Brain Health Innovation, BC Children’s Hospital and many other local start-ups and non-profit organizations. Caylee’s research interest lies in the use of co-design and participatory research methodologies as a way to support the improvement of health product, services and systems through a community and patient-centred focus. Within the lab, Caylee leads research projects related to quality improvement, hospital redevelopment, and service design using participatory and community-based research methodologies.

Halina Rachelson is a Masters student of Urban Planning at the University of British Columbia and has partnered with civil engineers in designing an enhanced mobility network system for the City of Kelowna based on the Dutch bicycle network design guidelines. She also worked in a team with emerging architects in reimagining a South Florida barrier island, and designed culturally-appropriate and resilient infrastructure to adapt to 2075 sea level rise projections.

Elizabeth B.-N Sanders joined the Design Department at The Ohio State University in 2011 after working in industry as a design research consultant since 1981. She introduced many of the methods and tools being used today to drive and inspire design from a human-centered perspective and has practiced co-designing across all the design disciplines. Liz is also the founder of MakeTools, LLC where she works at the front end of the changes taking place today in design. Her academic research focuses on generative design research, collective creativity, and transdisciplinarity. She shares her experiences in human-centered design with clients, colleagues, and students around the world. Liz’s goal is to bring participatory, human-centered design practices to the challenges we face for the future.

Stacie Schatz is a fourth year interaction design student at Emily Carr University and has been working as a Research Assistant within the Health Design Lab for three years. In this role, she has worked with the Provincial Health Services Authority to explore ways to increase fruit and vegetable consumption through interventions in the grocery store context, and with the Pacific Autism Family Network to enhance families’ access to Autism research and information. Her primary focus has been in service design, more specifically she is interested in design’s potential to promote and create opportunities for civic engagement and social innovation.

Deborah Shackleton is the Dean of Design and Dynamic Media and an Associate Professor who teaches design research and methods in the MDes program. Deborah’s research and teaching interests include design theory, human-centred designing, and learning theory for design development. In addition to her administrative role and teaching practice Deborah is a published designer, writer and photographer whose work has been recognized nationally and internationally. She is one of the founding editors of the award-winning Current (http://current.ecuad.ca) the University’s design research journal, the founding Chair of the ECU Research Ethics Board, and a certified member of the Society of Graphic Designers.

Adele Therias is a Bachelors student of Geography at the University of British Columbia and has conducted community-based research with the City of Surrey in which she evaluated a food security program by conducting expert interviews, a public survey, and a geospatial analysis on food accessibility. She proposed improvements for future City projects related to food access. She also worked with the Social Planning Council of Williams Lake to conduct focus groups and interviews in the community around transportation and youth employment rates. The group produced an alternative transportation proposal.

Cameron Tonkinwise is the Professor of Interdisciplinary Design at the School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney. He returned to Australia after a decade in North America holding the positions of Director Doctoral Studies at School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University, Associate Dean Sustainability at the Parsons School of Design and Co-Chair of the Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School in New York City. Cameron has a background in continental philosophy of technology, but the focus of Cameron’s current research and teaching is sustainable design, service design and sharing economies. With colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, he has been developing Transition Design, a collection of techniques for design-enabled multi-stage change toward more sustainable futures.

Emi Webb is a Bachelors student of Industrial Design at Emily Carr University and has worked with a local educational institution to develop an interactive textile based system that could enable and empower children who have learning differences. She also collaborated with Vancouver’s Fraser Health Authority to design an internal facing campaign to promote self-care. The goal of this project was to refocus attention on staff and emphasize their importance to healthcare, while humanizing them to patients.