@dcservicejam #GSJam #dcsj2022
Coaches & Presenters
It is a complicated web we weave.
Who will guide us?
We are thrilled to have some of the most experienced service design and design thinking experts as coaches and presenters. They will help us navigate core concepts and best practices, and keep us focused on creating the unimaginable.
Chris Hodowanec
Chris is the Director of Service Design at Blue Water where he uses his expertise in service and product design to guide clients and project teams throughout the design process to deliver amazing experiences. Chris has worked with a wide range of commercial accounts including BMW, State Farm, and Caterpillar as well as many federal agencies spanning civilian, defense, and safety and citizen services.
Seul Rhee
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Seul is a researcher and design strategist interested in identifying and solving problems using the human-centered design process and methodologies. An architect by training, she is a firm believer in the power of design and diversity in thinking to create meaningful experiences and sustainable solutions.
Benno Schmidt
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Benno is a healthcare designer in the Baltimore and Washington area. His work includes healthcare design for the insurance industry, health systems and hospitals, medical associations, and federal agencies. He is always looking for new places in DC to walk to, and work at.
Chris Scott​
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Chris Scott is a human-centered designer currently working at the intersection of data and democracy. Most recently, he led user research & design for The New Data Project—the team of geeks from Google, Amazon, and the Obama White House who designed and launched the VoteWithMe mobile app.
Before joining NDP in 2017, Chris spent 3 years living and working internationally as a design strategist, tackling challenges from gender equity in rural India to agricultural systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. He’s probably best known for that one time he ditched his elite job and the well-worn path of grad school to launch The Designers of Tomorrow Project—an experiment to create his own education in business, design, and social change. But the key to Chris’s heart is through an invitation to live music, authentic Mexican food, or a deep conversation about aviation.
Valerio Zanini
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Valerio is a product innovator and digital leader, Valerio Zanini is passionate about creating products that customers love and developing the teams that make them a reality. With two decades of product development experience in a variety of organizations including Capital One, Cisco, Goozex.com and others, he excels at building new products in the early stages of product innovation, where uncertainty and lack of a clear solution are the biggest challenges. He works with organizations worldwide to spark a culture of innovation and drive agile transformation.
He is the author of Deliver Great Products That Customers Love, published in 2018.
Glennette Clark
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Glennette is a design researcher for US Digital Services, adjunct professor at MICA and founder of UXCamps DC, NYC and Pittsburgh. In 2017, she and UXCamp DC received the honor of being recognized as a "Talent Cultivator" in DC by Techweek100 and listed as one of the Top 10 Blacks in Technology to Watch in 2013 by The Grio. She was also the Co-Director of DC Web Women's Girls Rock On the Web (GROW).
Glennette is an unwavering advocate for increasing the number of women and underrepresented minorities in the tech community. She has spoken about design and diversity in technology at the SXSW Interactive Festival, Digital Capital Week, and MovDev East to name a few.
She has a Journalism degree from Howard University and an MBA in Strategic Design from Philadelphia University.
Maia Sciupac
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Maia has over ten years of experience in product management and development, and thoroughly enjoys creative problem solving to address difficult challenges. She currently leads the Innovation Delivery team at Booz Allen Hamilton, where she utilizes human-centered design, instructional design, and business strategy to drive organizational change and impact. Prior to Booz Allen, she co-founded Create&, a design strategy firm that crowdsources big ideas and trains future makers in the practice of design thinking. In this capacity, she co-founded and continues to co-organize Unleaded, a design sprint meetup in Washington D.C. that runs workshops addressing issues such as family homelessness, designing for the aging and elderly community, and improving healthcare delivery. She received an MBA from Johns Hopkins University, and a BA (summa cum laude) from UC Berkeley.
Sofia Rogova
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Sofia is a Strategic and Urban Designer working at the intersection of human-centered design and public policy. Alongside her studies at Parsons The New School of Design in New York City and HafenCity University in Hamburg, Germany, Sofia has continuously collaborated with Landscape and Urban Designers, Interior Architects and Art Curators. She also holds an MFA degree in Industrial Design and Philosophy. Within her most recent projects, Sofia has contributed to urbanization projects in sub-urban or undeveloped areas in China and Germany; investigated the notion of void spaces in shrinking cities in the Ukraine; and designed strategies in order to make NASA’s research on air pollution more accessible to unversed audiences.
Sara Jamshidi
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Sara is a graphic designer with MA in visual communication from the Royal College of Art in London. She is a research-based designer with a practice that spans between the realms of archives and special collections, museums and education, with an editorial design approach.
Sara is currently based in Washington DC working at a boutique studio with local and national clients. Before attending RCA, Sara has worked at Design Observer, where she was senior designer working on editorial and client projects as well as contributing to the website as a writer including for her column, The Observers.
Andrea Montealegre
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Andrea is a Nicaraguan born User Experience Designer working at Capital One Labs. She’s always looking for an opportunity to learn and/or geek out. If you want to experience the meaning behind the word excited, feel free to ask Andrea about projection mapping, salsa dancing, or daft punk.
Megan Hamilton
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Megan is a design strategist at Capital One, where she works on unraveling problems at the intersection of people, money and technology. She is a graduate of Georgia Tech's M.S. Human-Computer Interaction program, and studied engineering & art in her path to a career in design. In her free time, Megan loves weaving, learning to snowboard, and collecting succulents.