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Payal Arora

Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam
Co-founder, FemLab

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Kurt Ward

Senior Design Director, Philips Healthcare

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Melissa Gregg

Senior Principal Engineer, Intel


Payal Arora

Monday, Oct 10, 9:00-10:30 am CEST (+livestream)

Payal Arora is a digital anthropologist, a TEDx speaker, and an author of award-winning books, including ‘The Next Billion Users’ with Harvard Press. Her expertise lies in user experience in the global south, digital inequality, and inclusive design. Forbes named her the “next billion champion” and the “right kind of person to reform tech.” She is a Professor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and Co-Founder of FemLab, a future of work initiative.

Payal’s work explores key issues in designing for, with, and in the Global South. Design has long been dictated by the aesthetic taste, values, needs, concerns, and aspirations of consumers in the West—but the “next billion users” are pioneering creative ways to repurpose design in ways that we are currently failing to capture. Does localization go against universal design principles? Is diversity scalable? How do we do justice in representing the voices of non-users or limited users?


Kurt Ward

Tuesday, Oct 11, 9:00-10:30am CEST (+livestream)

Kurt Ward is a Senior Design Director at Philips Healthcare who is responsible for strategic alliances and collaborations across businesses and partners to stimulate, inspire and explore new value spaces and innovation opportunities. He is based at Philips in the Netherlands and has led global design teams for over twenty years. He was previously the Director of research at Westwood One/CBS networks in New York. Kurt’s work focuses on redefining social determinants for resilient health. To design sustainable and adaptable health systems in the future, how can we reframe our understanding of humanity’s relationship with ourselves and the natural world?

Throughout his 22 years at Philips Design, he has constantly honed his skills and developed design thinking across many areas of the company. From Philips’ brand identity to helping to craft its mission and vision. From managing customer event experiences across Europe to the concept development and creative direction of the Philips Museum in Eindhoven. He has given speeches and held workshops across the globe, from India to South Africa and across Europe. In his childhood, he had the pleasure to play percussion with jazz greats Stan Kenton and Dizzy Gillespie. He spent much of his youth performing in local Cleveland Jazz clubs and now enjoys writing jazz compositions for piano in his spare time. He recently published a lyrical drama based on Greek mythology entitled Endymion or The State of Entropy.


Melissa Gregg

Melissa Gregg

Wednesday, Oct 12, 9:00-10:30am CEST (+livestream)

Melissa Gregg is a senior principal engineer in user experience driving carbon reduction and green software strategy at Intel. With a Ph.D. in gender and cultural studies, she is a widely cited author, theorist, and ethnographer, with over 60 peer-reviewed publications and books. Her research has appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Fortune, The New York Times, The Guardian, BBC, and CBC, and has been translated into Russian, Mandarin, and Korean. Melissa joined Intel in 2013 after a career in academia. She led Intel Labs’ first university investment in the social sciences before building user research to a position of strategic impact in the PC business. In client computing, her research informed a range of initiatives to support a more flexible and agile office, women’s role in the smart home, and increasingly responsive, energy-efficient laptops (Project Athena/ Intel EVO). Her current focus is driving sustainability strategy through software and open-source partnerships, in service of Intel’s RISE 2030 goals.