Sang-Soo Ahn has long been one of the most influential designers in East Asia. His typographic development work has almost made him a household name. He can justifiably claim to have master-minded and supervised a revolutionary transition of traditional Hangul, the Korean alphabet, into a functional medium for today, with all its digital demands and interpretations. A long-term Professor in the College of Fine Arts, in Seoul・s Hongik University, his early work in industry served to fire his enthusiasm for visual communication across many disciplines.

 

Elaine Ann is the Founder/Director of Kaizor Innovation, a strategic innovation consultancy uniquely positioned to help companies understand and strategize businesses/new product innovation for the China market. Born and raised in HK and having lived and worked in the U.S. for 12 years (1990-2002), her bi-cultural and bilingual background provides unique and in-depth insights into understanding both the U.S. and HK/China design scene. While in the U.S., she worked for Fitch Worldwide, Razorfish, Philips Design etc. Her past clients include HP, BMW DesignworksUSA, Lunar Design, Changhong, PCCW, Lan Kwai Fong etc. She is on the HK PolyU School of Design Department Advisory Committee and is also an Exco member of the HK Designers' Association. Elaine graduated from Carnegie Mellon University(MDES, BFA) and is currently doing an EMBA at the Cheung Kong Business School in Beijing.

 

Wan-Ru Chou received her Master degree of Product Design from Hochscule fure Angewandte Kunst in Wien. She is full time instructor in the Department of Industrial Design at Shih-Chien University (SCID). Since 1994 and serves as Chairperson of SCID from 1999 till now. She is also Design Columnist for Taiwan's magazine, member of various design competition juries Coordinator of international design workshops and Project Leader of University-Industry Cooperative Projects. Ms. Chou is presently living in Taipei, Taiwan.
 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the Davidson Professor of Psychology and Director of Quality of Life Research Center (QLRC) at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University in California. QLRC studies ．positive psychology・ in terms of such qualities as optimism, creativity, and intrinsic motivation. Mihaly is famous for his books ：Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience； and ：Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention；.
 

Kees Dorst is Professor of Design at the faculty of Design, Architecture and Building of the University of Technology, Sydney (Australia) and Senior Design Researcher at the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands). He also teaches design methods at the Design Academy Eindhoven and at various management institutes in The Netherlands, and works as a consultant in the fields of product design and product development. He is advisor to Young Designers and Industry and the Amsterdam Creativity Exchange, and a regular contributor to the magazine of the Dutch Designers Association BNO. He has published numerous articles and three books.
 

Ray Fok is currently Manager, User Experience and Design at Yahoo! (Hong Kong). He is responsible for Yahoo! Hong Kong product design and usability, identifying product/user trends and emerging technologies, and serves as advocate for users across Yahoo Hong Kong products. Prior to joining Yahoo! Fok was Creative Lead at Viant, a worldwide strategic business management consulting firm, and before that, held various positions with technology and consulting firms in Chicago and Silicon Valley for more than 10 years.

 

Dr. Michael K K Fung is the Principal of the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (Kwai Chung), a major post-secondary institution specialized in fashion and image design in Hong Kong. In a career spanning three decades, he has been involved in the fashion industry and fashion education in Hong Kong and has served on numerous design and fashion related committees of the HKSAR Government. Currently, he is leading a Curriculum Development Team of the VTC Design Institute Advisory Board.
 
Jian Hang, Professor, School of Art, Tsinghua University 1999 First Award of Excellent Dissertation of the Decade, Association of Chinese Industrial Design 2003 National Excellent Young Teacher Awards, Ministry of Education
 
Renke He is currently the Dean of Art and Design Institute of Hunan University, and Professional Teaching Chairman of the National Steering Committee of Industrial Design of the People・s Republic of China. Prof. He・s research interests are in industrial design, design history, and design management.
 
Lorraine Justice is currently the Director of the School of Design at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Prior to joining PolyU, Professor Justice was Director of the Industrial Design Program in the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). She has served on several international design juries such as Design of the Decade and the Asia Design Awards. ??Professor Justice was named one of the top 40 influential designers in the world by I.D. Magazine in New York City for 2006.? She currently also serves as Executive Board of Directors for the Icsid.
 
Alice Lo is an Associate Professor of the School of Design at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University where she advocates a multidisciplinary approach that stimulates cross-fertilisation of ideas. Her teaching and research concerns creativity development and the application of design thinking skills to other disciplines such as engineering, marketing, and health and social sciences. She was editor and art director of the award-winning book Navigating Design: a voyage of discovery that details creative work at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
 
Shashank Mehta is a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical) & a Post Graduate in Product Design (Industrial Design). Mr. Shashank Mehta is currently a faculty of Industrial Design and an Activity Chairman, Education at the National Institute of Design, NID. Prior to this, Mr. Mehta also headed NID・s Outreach programmes & Industry Programmes & Project departments. NID, through its outreach programmes is actively engaged in various design intervention projects that are socially relevant and help create sustainable employment generation opportunities thereby improving the quality of life of artisans.
 
Jeremy Myerson is the Director of Innovation RCA at the Royal College of Art. Jeremy is an active writer, researcher and consultant with extensive experience of design in business and society. He is Professor of Design Studies at the Royal College of Art, where he has worked since 1999 as co-director of the RCA's Helen Hamlyn Research Centre, leading a programme to link new graduates with a range of business partners.
 
Takeshi Sunaga is a founding member and Professor in the Department of Information Design at Tama Art University. With a background in Design and Cognitive Science, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Tsukuba in 1987. He was a research fellow at the Institute of Design in Chicago and a Visiting Professor at Stanford University. His current research is on Social Networking Systems and People's Expression under a grant by the Japanese Government Foundation.
 
Douglas Tomkin is Associate Professor and Head of School of Design, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney. He was chief executive of a design consultancy in Hong Kong, with the aim of helping local manufacturers develop their own design capability. He has focused his research on reducing the environmental impact of consumer products and in integrating sustainable design practice into university courses.
 
Chujit J. Treerattanaphan teaches in Industrial Design at the School of Architecture and Design, King Mongkutt's University of Technology, Thonburi (KMUTT), Thailand. While she teaches and excels in cognitive human factors, interaction and interface design, communication and design research, she concurrently is also a consultant at REDEK (Research and Design Center at KMUTT) focusing on user-centered design, trends, and design strategies.
 
Chris Yin is an Art Director for Visual Communication Design at Philips Design. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Taiwan, Chris spent 16 years in the United States before moving back to Hong Kong. He has extensive experience in creating packaging, print, web, and identity systems for international clients while working for various design firms in New York and San Francisco.
 
Douglas Young, a Hong Kong native, trained as an architect in the UK. In 1996, he founded GOD with his partner Benjamin Lau. With three Hong Kong locations and sister shops in major Chinese cities, GOD retails contemporary furniture and housewares as well as lifestyle accessories. The majority of the merchandise is self-branded and designed in-house by a multidisciplinary design team led by Young. The long term vision is to build a Hong Kong brand that is both forward looking and proud to display its cultural origins.