Research Design Track Speakers
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Darrel Rhea
Darrel Rhea is the CEO for Cheskin, a consulting firm that guides innovation through its deep understanding of people, cultures and change. Rhea is one of America’s top strategic design consultants who has advised leading companies including Microsoft, Pepsi, Herman Miller, Kraft and Procter & Gamble. At the heart of his work is a clear-cut and simple message of "making meaning" through relentless attention to the people you serve.
√ Speech Topic: Making Meaning: The Role of Design in Creating Deep Customer Value.
The driving principle for design in the new millennium should be about creating deep empathy and connecting with people. In this presentation, Rhea will describe how the best practices in design, design research, and innovation have evolved beyond providing emotional and status-related benefits. By focusing on meaning, our industry can cross boundaries to "design for the majority," creating connections in our shrinking world.
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Duncan Berry
As the CEO of Applied Iconology, Duncan Berry focuses on re-animating a brand’s sensory equities in order to expand emotional connections with consumers and customers. Berry has extensive experience with global enterprise process management, marketing, systems design and quality control.
√ Speech Topic: The Visual Language of Emotion
Berry’s lecture will revolve around semiotics - the study of signs, and as the title suggests, the visual language of emotion. He will discuss the tools and methodology he’s developed that uncover opportunities behind the emotional drivers of a brand or product. In addition, he will also discuss how these tools, when in application, elevate the design efficacy discussion to an intellectual level that supercedes subjective preferences.
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Uday Dandavate
Uday Dandavate is a founder and CEO of SonicRim, a global design research company. Dandavate, a firm believer in the participatory approach, has helped many Fortune 100 companies and middle market companies gain insights into consumer behaviors. He is also one of the founders of a global initiative called Design with India, which is focused on establishing a global think tank for facilitating design and innovative partnerships with India.
√ Speech Topic: Dreaming of Life in a Global Market
Uday Dandavate will share the insights he has gained from helping clients understand people, cultures and trends. Products, technologies and brands are the medium through which your customers seek to live their dreams. You can prepare your organization for the future only by aligning yourself with the dreams of your customers. You can maximize your investments in innovation when you design with people as opposed to designing for people.
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Product Design Track Speakers
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Joe Heron
Joe Heron serves as the president and CEO of Ardea Beverage Company, the business behind airforce Nutrisoda brand. Under Heron’s leadership, the company’s line of wellness-enhanced beverages has grown from a small startup to being acquired as a wholly owned subsidiary of PepsiAmericas. Prior to starting Ardea Beverage Co., Heron’s extensive experience in medical nutrition resulted in his relocation from South Africa to Minneapolis to run Novartis’ North American nutrition business.
√ Speech Topic: How Design Helped a New Soda Take Off.
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Curt Bailey
Curt Bailey is the president of Sundberg-Ferar, a product development consulting firm that helps companies in a wide variety of industries including housewares, transportation, medical, recreational and consumer electronics leverage the power of design to de-commoditize their products. Curt is named as primary inventor on dozens of U.S. patents and has spoken at numerous events on the process of designing products with an emotional appeal.
√ Speech Topic: I Didn’t Like it at First But It’s Starting to Grow On Me.
New, exciting, breakthrough product concepts, while often extraordinary, are also something else: out of the ordinary. Unfortunately for product developers, humans naturally posses a healthy skepticism and fear of "out of the ordinary." Bailey will speak to the benefit of benchmarking great products and understanding what people thought of them the first time they saw them and why. Only when this information is gathered can we understand why new products are polarizing and how to change it.
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Greg Zimmer
Greg Zimmer has been at his position, as the Chief Brand Designer, at 3M since September 2006, revolutionizing the way they think about design and strategy for their Consumer and Office brands. Previously, Zimmer was at Procter & Gamble for nearly 14 years, leading design on some of their most successful brands: Crest, Iams, Vicks, Tide, Mr. Clean and Febreze.
√ Speech Topic: Bring Your Brand Equity to Life via Design.
During his presentation, Zimmer will cover the three key steps that need to be taken when bringing your brand equity to life. First, one needs to understand how the evolution of your equity and package design can keep your product contemporary and relevant with your consumers. Next, understand what design equities to keep, evolve or leave behind. And lastly, how to know when equity/design revolution as opposed to equity/design evolution is necessary.
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Experience Design Track Speakers
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Kimberlee Karr
As Marketing Manager of Juut Salonspa, Karr oversees the artistic design and strategic implementation of promotional campaigns developed for the company. With industry experience ranging from consulting services to professional portraiture, Karr has helped several business professionals who have struggled with the execution of marketing promotions that effectively reflect their image.
√ Speech Topic: The Consumer/Brand Love Affair.
Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, but where are your customers from? Business brands around the world are in search of the perfect partner; the life-long mate that will be loyal to their products and services through thick and thin. However, consumers on the other hand, like to play the field and explore their options. Karr will discuss how your brand can engage in meaningful, long-term relationships with customers.
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Geoffrey Warner
Geoffrey Warner serves as the principal of Alchemy Architects and registered architect of the renowned weeHouse. His work has concentrated on art and industry and maximizing the impact of modest budgets through creative constructive technologies, which is evident with the popularity of weeHouse; which is a flexible line of prefabricated modules that may be adapted and changed to meet the diverse needs of today’s market.
√ Speech Topic: weeHouse: Making Prefab Architecture Good, Cheap, Fast.
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Jay Hewitt
Chief Marketing Officer of Transamerica Captial, Inc., Jay Hewitt oversees marketing functions for Transamerica Captial’s bank, wirehouse and financial planning channel. He is charged with strategic planning, sales, and marketing support for the company’s business unit. With more than 20 years of industry experience, he has worked with companies such as American Express, Kemper Life and US Bancorp.
√ Speech Topic: Learning from Experience: Boomeranging Consumers into Customers.
There are 78 million baby boomers out there trying to figure out how to retire. That’s one big number - just look at all the ads in the magazines and billboards. Hewitt will explain how his company’s campaign to attract these boomers, was experientially designed to help financial planners tap into this market by understanding the entire experience of retirement planning.
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Communications Design Track Speakers
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Amy Arias
Amy Arias founded Mosquito with a clear vision: to think creatively and strategically, while enhancing brands with premium merchandise and apparel. Along with overseeing Mosquito’s creative and marketing efforts, she manages the sales and productions staff, and continues to work closely with clients and vendors alike. Despite Mosquito’s rapid growth, Amy remains the company’s creative conscience.
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Aaron Keller
Aaron Keller, Founding Partner at Capsule, helps brands understand themselves through research and distinguish themselves through design. He is a former adjunct professor of marketing at the University of St. Thomas and has been cited in The Boston Globe, Newsweek, The New York Times, and USA Today. His first book, Design Matters: Logos 01, by Rockport Publishers launched in July of 2007. His second book, Design Matters: Packaging 01, will launch in June of 2008.
√ Speech Topic: The relationship between design and business.
Business and design are metaphorically and sometimes physically worlds apart. While design swims in the vast ocean of emotion, business tirelessly pays tribute to the almighty number. The pair of speakers will talk about the relationship between these two entities; both metaphorically in how design can impact business and practically in how each can understand the other better.
 Download the 10:34 minute preview podcast
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Jane Casto
Jane Casto is a director in Research, Development and Engineering at Ecolab Inc., where she is focused on delivering value through innovative packaging to Ecolabs customers. Casto has spent most of her career in a variety of product development roles; she has worked for several divisions of 3M, started a product development consulting firm, and held several positions with Imation.
√ Speech Topic: The Creative Cocktail: Getting Results from a Stressed Organization.
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Luis Fitch
Luis Fitch serves as the Principal and Creative Director for UNO, a Hispanic branding agency that specializes in reaching the respective market. Fitch has led award-winning branding efforts for top Fortune 500 companies including Target Corp., Frito-Lay, Kimberly Clark and MTV Latino. He is a proud member of the Advisory Council Group for Diversity for The American Institute of Graphic Arts in Minnesota.
√ Speech Topic: Authentic Mexican Festivities: Grassroots Marketing.
Experiential marketing can have a tremendous and powerful impact on Mexican consumers away from home. It evokes meaningful experiences providing a nostalgic emotional connection with cultural influences of authentic flavors, sights and sounds. Fitch will discuss how to engage and effectively deliver branding communications and experience design to tell an authentic story.
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KEYNOTES
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Malcolm Haines
Malcolm Haines is principal of MHMC, a marketing consultancy that creates marketing plans and materials for technology companies. Previously, Haines served for many years as Chief Imagination Officer at IBM, where he learned a lot about marketing, particularly about how not to do it.
√ Speech Topic: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity.
Haines will talk about his experience in environments that occasionally let a thousand flowers bloom, but usually became a barren corporate wasteland policed by mindless automata. At the heart of his approach is the thought expressed by theoretical physicist Niels Bohr, "You’re not thinking, you’re just being logical." In any company, you get what you reward, and it’s only when executives understand this aphorism that they will begin to create a more perfect environment in which design and creativity can flourish.
Download 14:54 minute preview podcast
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Eric Ryan
At age 27, Eric Ryan founded method and "People Against Dirty", a consumer goods company that has reinvented homecare products with an innovative branding and product design approach. In six years, method has challenged some of the world’s largest multinationals in home cleaning, laundry, personal care and air care to become the fastest growing consumer products company in the U.S. Recently, method was named #7 on the Inc 500 list for fastest growing private companies in America.
√ Speech Topic: Building a Belief Brand.
Ryan will be sharing the story of how method married style and substance to reinvent household cleaning. He will discuss the building of a brand from the inside out using a design driven philosophy, and will reveal how design and product leadership puts an emphasis on earned media instead of paid media.
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Scott Williams
Scott Williams recently accepted the position as EVP/Chief Marketing Officer at the Morgans Hotel Group. Previous to this, Williams served as the Chief Creative Officer of Starwood Hotels for nearly 8 years. During his time there, he set the company’s global visual and verbal communications strategy, developed worldwide creative standards, controlled creative output, and bore the final responsibility for the quality of all of the company’s advertising and marketing creative products.
√ Speech Topic: Indifference Sucks.
The general message that design matters is not unique, but Williams’s approach to proving it through data and artifacts is. He will discuss what we can learn from observation in the user environment and how we can then import that knowledge for innovation - he will also give examples of how you can emotionally connect and resonate with the customer.
Download the 8:12 minute preview podcast
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