Upscale
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Passionated and driven Product Designer & Entrepreneur. Been able to work at some incredible companies like Typeform, Get Bamboo, Thingtesting, Flodesk to mention a few. I've started a couple of businesses and failed some and learned a lot.

I like to write about technology and future trends as well as keep up with what's going on in the realm of space, robotics, and the world of finance. I've been living the last 6 years in the design capital of Europe, Barcelona. But recently found myself becoming a dad, and priorities changed and I now live in the rural countryside in Sweden.

American technologist. Product experience leader across consumer and enterprise. Early catalyst for generative art and computational design for commercial applications across Web2 and Web3. First recipient of White House's National Design Award for algorithmically-generated visualizations informed by data + AI. Noted book author, online influencer, and investor in diverse startups.

Currently serving as VP, Engineering, Head of Computational Design / AI Platform at Microsoft. Formerly chief technology officer of Everbridge, Sonos board of directors, Wieden+Kennedy board of directors, Kleiner Perkins partner, MIT Media Lab data visualization lead, Automattic head of design + inclusion, Publicis Sapient executive vice president and chief experience officer, and 16th president/ceo of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Author of five books including a gentle intro to AI/ML "How To Speak Machine" and the tech bestseller of 2006 "Laws of Simplicity." Writings, interviews, or talks include WSJ, NYT, TED, BBC, WEF, COP, CNN, The Economist, Forbes, USA Today, Fortune, Fast Company, Esquire. Honors include three honorary doctorate degrees, TIME Best Twitter 140, White House National Design Award, Fast Company Masters of Innovation, LinkedIn Top 10 US Influencer, Esquire 75 Most Influential of the 21st Century, and Tribeca Film Festival Disruptor Award for launching the STEM to STEAM movement in the US.

"Maeda is to design what Warren Buffett is to finance." —Wired Magazine

Jason Zada is an award-winning filmmaker, creative technologist, and pioneer in AI-driven storytelling. With a career spanning film, interactive media, and emerging technology, he has consistently pushed the boundaries of how stories are told and experienced. He is best known for directing the feature film The Forest and creating the viral interactive experience Take This Lollipop, which captivated millions worldwide. His work seamlessly blends innovation and emotion, redefining audience engagement across multiple platforms.

As the founder of Secret Level, the leading AI-native entertainment studio, Jason is at the forefront of reimagining filmmaking with artificial intelligence. His work explores how AI can revolutionize storytelling, reshape creative workflows, and challenge traditional notions of authorship. Through Secret Level, he is developing groundbreaking AI-native content while fostering a new generation of AI filmmakers. A thought leader in the space, Jason continues to push the limits of what's possible, bridging technology and creativity to shape the future of entertainment.

Global VP of Design and Creative Innovation at DEPT® / Head of Design of DOGSTUDIO/DEPT® by day, Henry spent nearly two decades trying to pioneer on digital immersive and experiential work for some of the largest brands on the planet. He fosters a culture built around storytelling, an obvious love for details, and a heavy tendency to reference pop-culture in his approach.

By night, Henry conceives art pieces through cutting-edge artificial intelligence-driven tools imagined and built by people much smarter then he is. His recent AI-assisted pieces got auctioned and sold at Sotheby's for 5 figures, and his body of work has been exhibited in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and so on.To his greatest delight, his latest film, "Kitsune" stirred even more the pot of the "oh, AI normally can't do that" conversations.

Finally, Henry quickly figured out letting machines do all the work, speaking of himself at the third person, and a sharp sense of sarcasm would be his best chance at pretending he actually belongs to the international art and design scene.

With a unique journey from engineer to visual designer to design executive, Leonardo currently serve as VP of Design for SimplePractice, the world's leading electronic healthcare record (EHR) platform for independent health and wellness practitioners. His multidisciplinary background allows him to bring both structured thinking and creative problem-solving to the complex challenges of healthcare technology.

Throughout his career at industry-leading companies including Spotify, Intuit, Facebook, and Yahoo!, he's built and nurtured Design, User Experience, and User Research teams across both B2B and complex B2C environments. He's particularly passionate about strengthening design culture and driving product innovation in traditionally underserved technology spaces where thoughtful design can create meaningful impact.

Beyond his role at SimplePractice, Leonardo remains connected to his roots as a visual designer and illustrator, bringing this creative perspective to his advisory work with startups in the FinTech and Food Ecosystems spaces. He's also actively exploring the potential of generative AI tools to enhance his personal creative projects and branding work for small businesses and friends. His approach combines analytical rigor with human-centered design principles to help organizations deliver exceptional customer experiences through design-led product development.

Martin LeBlanc is Chief Experience Officer at Freepik and founder of Iconfinder, a design and tech leader driving AI-powered creative tools. At Freepik, he shapes user experiences for millions, building on his work with Iconfinder, the top icon marketplace sold in 2022. Mixing design, AI, and product know-how, Martin focuses on practical, user-first solutions. At this conference, he'll talk about AI's impact on creativity and lessons from growing design businesses.

Claire Xue is an AI creative educator, and a dedicated advocate for responsible, human-centered AI. She serves as the Marketing Director for the Project Odyssey AI Film Competition. Claire has also trained creative teams at renowned LVMH brands like Sephora and Hennessy, helping them integrate AI tools into their workflows effectively and thoughtfully. Through her newsletter, "The AI Stuff Creators and Artists Should Know," she shares insights on the ethical, legal, and practical aspects of AI in the creative industry while fostering a vibrant, learning community.

Andrea Trabucco-Campos is a graphic and type designer whose practice utilizes typography and behavior to build transformative visual identities. An active voice in emerging technologies like AI, his work investigates their role in the design process and culture. His output spans the digital to the material, encompassing brand identities and systems, websites and apps, print and editorial, motion and interaction, signage and environmental, and custom typefaces.

Andrea has led teams in transforming and launching some of the world's most renowned brands. He has partnered with a range of organizations including Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Apple, Mastercard, The New York Times, United Nations, Noma, Space10 (IKEA's Creative Lab), and MasterClass, among others.

Andrea was born in Colombia, grew up in Italy and now resides in New York. He leverages the experience of his own cultural journey to uncover the essence of others' identities. His pursuit of contextual tensions and fluency in design history allows him to create work that crosses boundaries, strategically putting brands in conversation with culture.

Andrea was previously a creative director at Gretel and DesignStudio, and is returning to Pentagram after prior stints as a designer and associate partner in the New York office from 2015-2019. Alongside these roles, he has maintained an independent practice for over a decade, designing identities for theaters and film festivals, award-winning books and websites, and custom typefaces for publications.

In 2022, Andrea's active curiosity led him to co-found and run Vernacular, a small independent publisher with a focus on the intersection of form, typography and visual culture that stretch beyond the commonly agreed registers of "good design." His first book, Artificial Typography, has garnered international attention and recognition for pushing the evolving conversation of AI and design.

Andrea holds a BA in Philosophy from New York University and received his Masters in Design at the Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan. He has taught courses in typography and graphic design at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) since 2017, and he regularly lectures at a number of other institutions, including Parsons School of Design and the Cooper Union in New York and the Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan.

His work has been honored in Fast Company's Innovation by Design Awards, the D&AD Awards, the Art Directors Club Awards, the Type Directors Club Annual, the Society of Typographic Arts 100, the New York Design Awards, and Brand New's Best Identities, among others. In 2018 he was nominated for a Grammy for his and Luke Hayman's work with The National.

Sofia Lopez is the AI Growth Manager at Freepik, where she leads initiatives to expand the company's AI-powered marketing offerings. With a background combining ar history, science communication and creative marketing, Sofia drives adoption of Freepik's innovative AI tools across global markets. She specializes in strategic product marketing for AI design tools, translating technical capabilities into clear benefits for creative users. Sofia works closely with creative agencies, freelancers, and AI creators to build engaged communities and ensure tools meet real-world needs. She leads workshops and educational initiatives, as well as events showcasing the potential of AI tools for enhancing creativity. At this conference, she'll share tactics for communicating AI value through case studies from her work in creative technology.

GMUNK is a globally renowned digital artist, live-action director and motion designer whose creativity and innovation span a unique range of mediums. The through-line in his work utilizes a fusion of psychedelic themes and richly textured palettes, and his signature lens-based style is enigmatic, atmospheric, and metaphysical – much like the Munky himself.

His ethos is driven by his desire to learn and be uncomfortable. He continuously seeks to apply his foundation in motion design to new mediums, with new collaborators. The results of these labors often take beautiful and unexpected forms as short films, installations, digital art, data visualizations, commercials, music videos, title sequences and various applications of motion design.

GMUNK's work has been exhibited and sold at Christie's, Sotheby's and in fine-art galleries around the world. His early Flash and Motion Design work set the bar for experimentation in the medium and has been studied in schools internationally for over two decades. His projection-mapping opus BOX is one of the most viral short films ever made and won prestigious awards including the Cannes Grand Prix and Siggraph's Best in Show. He produced one of the world's most iconic image campaigns with the Microsoft Windows 10 desktop wallpaper, seen by over a billion people worldwide. He pioneered early Augmented Reality concepts by designing the holographic content in science-fiction pillars Tron: Legacy and Oblivion. His full-spectrum photography series InfraMunk has inspired an entire generation of artists and has been published worldwide in numerous print and online platforms including Fubiz, DesignBoom, and Engadget. Over decades, his commercial work has been prolific, with commissions for clients such as Apple, Disney, Nike, Adidas, Samsung, Microsoft, Meta, Audi, Maserati, Mercedes, NASA, Sony, Uber, Dolby, HP, Adobe, Coca-Cola, Tonal, Dobel, The Creators Project, Asus, Hummer, Infiniti and HBO.

His work often centers around themes of identity, the subconscious, and our human connection to technology.

Claudio Guglieri is a Spanish designer and lecturer based in San Francisco, California. He leads teams and designs interfaces for clients of all sizes. In the past two decades, he has done work for big companies such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, or Meta and also smaller startups like Opal Camera where he joined as Head of Design and went to launch a new consumer device to the market and envision the future of their product line up.

Throughout his career, Claudio has done work in almost every vertical (gaming, healthcare, entertainment, financial) and that has helped him acquire a broad perspective on the tenets, the musts and the shouldn'ts of interactive design. He actively shares his insights through lectures and writings, contributing to events such as TEDx, Awwwards Conference, UXWeek by Capital One, AIGA, or OFFF.

Original Author of ComfyUI.

Ben is the founder of the design studio Nonlinear. Previously, he was the design director for OpenAI, and was one of the first communication designers to join Facebook’s team in California. Notably, while working at Facebook, he cofounded the Facebook Analog Research Laboratory, an internal print studio and art program. He currently serves on the board of the Corita Art Center, and is also an alumnus and advisor of John Bielenberg’s experimental design education program, Project M, where he explores the role designers can play in encouraging social change.