Speakers

Nathan co-founded EightShapes with Dan Brown near Washington, DC in 2006. He's passionate about information architecture, user experience design, and front end development, and leads and consults with design systems teams to chart a strategic path and optimize operations. He wrote Modular Web Design in 2009, blogs about design systems regularly, and speaks at events worldwide.

Christine Perfetti is the Founding Principal of Perfetti Media, a user research and product consultancy based in Washington, D.C. She has spent 20 years refining the qualitative and quantitative research practices she leverages to help her clients understand their users and customers.

Danielle is the CEO of Women Talk Design, where she’s on a mission to amplify the voices of women and nonbinary folks. She’s trained hundreds of individuals on the power of storytelling and how to become more confident public speakers. She co-founded Austin Design Week, a week-long event celebrating the design community in Austin through 100+ free community-hosted talks, workshops, and events that ran from 2016-2021.

Alison has led teams of individuals in problem-solving and creating solutions for the real world in both boot-strapping start-ups and large Fortune 100 companies. She firmly believes that her leadership philosophy and coaching approach combined create environments where people can discover, make sense of what’s in front of them, and progress forward with momentum.

Stuart is a Creative Director based in Toronto with a 15-year track record of building and leading teams alongside rolling up his sleeves and getting the work done. His creative career has blended the hell out of the concepts and craft of advertising, digital, experiential, and the web, working at some of the best shops around — BBDO, Cossette, Proximity, Array of Stars, FCB/SIX, Teehan+Lax, Trajectory, DDB, DARE, Edelman, and many others, plus 4+ years owning and running Stack.

Specializing in pioneering multi-modal banking experiences that seamlessly merge cutting-edge chatbot technology with human-centric service design.

Sunni (Sun) Brown is the founder of creative consultancy Sunni Brown Ink and recently reincarnated the Center for Deep Self Design (getting its second life after a tragicomic opening in March of 2020!).

Jane is a research-driven UX content design consultant who has worked across a range of industries, including fintech, healthcare, mobility, HR tech, enterprise SaaS, travel tech, and retail, with clients across Europe, Asia, and North America. She’s been a journalist, documentary producer, and professional development educator. She is passionate about storytelling, plain language, and strong collaboration. With her one-person content studio, Character, she specializes in workshops and facilitation, but she'll also happily write the words and stories that make your software go. 

Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher who helps organizations to build more mature user research practices.

Guadalupe commenced her professional journey in the realm of architecture, where she developed a deep appreciation for space, form, and user interaction within physical environments