Detailed Agenda: 2025 SEGD Conference

Quinlin Messenger
Founder & Director, JUST Design

In a world overwhelmed by crisis and complexity, it can feel impossible to make a difference. Quinlin Messenger, founder of JUST Design, invites us to reframe this mindset. Through a deeply personal and global lens, he offers a design-centered call to action: start small, lead with care, and use your creativity to build momentum toward change. This is a moment to remember that even modest gestures can shape powerful futures.

Takeaways:

• Design is a practice of care and action—even small, thoughtful interventions can shift systems, behaviors, and outcomes over time.
• Possibility begins with presence. Facing global uncertainty requires us to show up—honestly, humbly, and consistently—as creative citizens.
• Hope is a design strategy. Grounding our work in hope, rather than perfectionism or fear, makes space for collective authorship and long-term impact.

Panel with Gamynne Guillotte
Chief Education and Community Engagement Officer, SFMOMA

In this panel, we ask: What is the role of experience design in shaping how we understand the world—and each other? Join cultural leaders and educators for a conversation on the urgency of media literacy and how museums, exhibitions, and public spaces can foster empathy, critical thinking, and active citizenship.

Takeaways:

• Experience design shapes how people understand truth. Our choices in interpretation, context, and framing carry social responsibility.
• Designing for better citizens means designing for better questions. The goal isn’t authority—it’s inquiry, literacy, and agency.
• Public institutions must model care and accountability. When rooted in listening and transparency, design can build civic trust and belonging.

Jeremy Mende
Artist, Designer, Educator – Mende Design

Jeremy Mende explores storytelling as a sensory, somatic, and philosophical practice. This talk encourages designers to reconnect with the natural world and with one another—not just to convey meaning, but to amplify memory, embodiment, and shared experience. This is about designing not just what people see, but what they feel and carry forward.

Takeaways

• Human-centered experiences drive deeper brand connection. Design that engages emotion and memory increases resonance—and retention.
• Nature and narrative are not separate. We are part of the living world—and our work can reflect that interdependence and rhythm.
• True connection transcends aesthetics. Design that prioritizes feeling, attention, and reflection invites deeper relational experiences.

Rodrigo Isasi
Managing Partner, Empathy (Peru)

Amid rapid technological change, resilience requires anchoring innovation in enduring wisdom. This talk introduces guiding principles from the Sacred Valley that help leaders design futures that balance progress with purpose. It calls for strategies that connect modern innovation with timeless human values.

Takeaways

• Resilience is relational. Across cultures, sustainable design solutions are built on trust, co-creation, and local knowledge—not top-down control.
• Adaptability is a leadership skill. Businesses that model responsive, Adaptive systems are stronger than rigid ones and are better positioned for long-term relevance.
• Global insights reveal shared values. Listening beyond borders expands our toolkit and our capacity to design for equity and transformation.

Karishma Sheth
Director, Experience Design, Airbnb

Karishma Sheth presents a story-first approach to experience design that surfaces a city’s intangible DNA—its rituals, histories, and quirks—and translates them into authentic, memorable moments. Drawing on Airbnb’s relaunch of Experiences and a San Francisco case study, she shares how editorial research, deep listening, and human exemplars can shape offerings that feel rooted in the culture of a place. Central to her talk is designing interaction mechanics that invite connection and belonging, while safeguarding cultural integrity and promoting local livelihoods.

Takeaways

• Identify and design for a city’s essence rather than surface attractions.
• Elevate human exemplars—hosts, makers, caretakers—to lead experiences that are culturally true.
• Build interaction mechanics that invite participation while protecting community values.

Michaela Pihl Olsen
Partner, Urgent.Agency

Michaela Pihl Olsen of Urgent.Agency explores why wayfinding matters: it not only shapes how we engage with and feel in a space but also provides crucial support in context-dependent situations, guiding people safely and efficiently when it matters most. She reframes wayfinding as a supportive design tool rather than an afterthought—rooted in Scandinavian traditions of human-centered design, craft, and holistic integration. Exploring how we design for our surroundings in ways that remain meaningful over time, she points to how a holistic approach to wayfinding can foster belonging and quality of life, while reflecting on the tension between digital disruption and human sensory experience.

Takeaways

• Effective wayfinding starts with empathy for the user’s context.
• Rooted in Scandinavian design values, it fosters belonging and quality of life.
• Wayfinding can shape how we experience the future.

Forest Stearns
Principal Artist, DRAWEVERYWHERE STUDIOS

Why is creativity embraced in some spaces and policed out of others? Artist Forest Stearns maps the cultural and policy “zoning codes” that dictate where art happens—and offers strategies for expanding those boundaries. From embedding artists in unexpected institutions to using public interventions as prototypes for the future, Forest reveals how permission shapes possibility, and how designers can advocate for creativity as civic infrastructure.

Takeaways

• Map constraints to identify “creative corridors” where experimentation can thrive.
• Treat artist-in-residence programs as R&D for public imagination.
• Policy and culture can be redesigned to allow wonder in more places.

Jamie Shaw
Partner, LMNL Studio

Designing for possible futures means forecasting the nature of our increasingly integrated environments. Omnispatial thinking is the practice of pairing architects and designers with technologists and storytellers to build spaces that treat technology as a material layer. An ethos, a design modality, and a workflow, it is a new approach to designing a connected ecosystem across physical, digital and virtual spaces. By using tools like VR in the design process, we can prototype feeling, exploring light, materiality, spatial relationships, and ambitious possibilities before a project is ever built. Learn how immersive tools can engage communities remotely, accelerate iteration, and sell ideas with an omnispatial workflow that moves from sketch to virtual world to build.

Takeaways:

• Omnispatial design is a practice of collaboration and translation between disciplines.
• Immersive simulation is an empathy tool, not just a rendering. 
• Think of technology as a material layer in the built environment.

Bradley “GMUNK” Munkowitz
Director and Digital Artist at GMUNK Studio

At the heart of GMUNK’s practice lies a devotion to transformation. Over two decades, he has moved fluidly between disciplines—motion design, live-action cinema, holography, photography—never allowing himself to be defined by a single medium. Each body of work is an alchemy of form and spirit, merging the psychedelic and the metaphysical with the technological. His collaborations become dialogues between the subconscious and the machine, between imagination and material, resulting in visual worlds that are at once enigmatic and deeply human.

This talk reflects on reinvention not as a strategy but as a philosophy of being. To remain fluid, to embrace change, and to surrender to the unknown is to embody the very conditions of art itself. GMUNK shares how this ongoing metamorphosis—through projects that span the virtual and the physical, the cosmic and the intimate—reveals the power of art to question identity, expand perception, and illuminate our evolving relationship with technology and the self.

Takeaways:

• Embrace reinvention: practice ongoing transformation across mediums and identity.
• Combine subconscious exploration with digital and physical creative tools.
•  Design projects that expand perception and challenge identity.

Moderator:
Joell Angel-Chumbley, University of Cincinnati DAAP, City of Cincinnati, SEGD Board Member; SEGD Academic Task Force Chair

Panelists:
Tim McNeil, University of California Davis
Gerald Sastra, Graduate Student, Rhode Island School of Design

This mainstage panel examines the state of education in experience design—how academic programs and professional practice can better align to prepare the next generation. Panelists will discuss legacy, professional readiness, and championing the achievements of students and practitioners. Survey results from the SEGD Academic Task Force will frame the conversation, highlighting trends, challenges, and opportunities for co-op programs, internships, and mentorships.

Takeaways:

• Bridging education and practice is essential for long-term impact.
• Recognition fuels the growth of the profession.
• Aligning curriculum with real-world skills strengthens both academic and professional outcomes.

Abigail Honor
Director, Lorem Ipsum, Voices of Experience Series

A celebration of individuals and organizations whose contributions have significantly advanced the field of experiential graphic design. This year’s awards highlight the leadership of Alan Jacobson, FSEGD, who chaired the 2025 Fellows Committee, and Nu Goteh, who chaired the 2025 Achievement Awards. Together with fellow honorees, their recognition embodies the values of SEGD—innovation, inclusivity, and impact—and demonstrates how leadership roles shape the ongoing legacy of the profession.

A candid, interactive conversation with the 2025 SEGD Fellows, reflecting on their careers, philosophies, and contributions to the profession. This session offers a chance to learn directly from design leaders whose legacies have shaped the field, while exploring how fellowship can model mentorship, innovation, and responsibility for future generations.

Adam Brodsley
Principal / Creative Director, Volume Inc.

Eric Heiman
Principal / Creative Director, Volume Inc.

Our everyday lives are increasingly consumed by technology, software, and screens. With that has come an emphasis on “problem-solving” and efficiency above all else, whether on our devices or IRL. Adam Brodsley and Eric Heiman offer a practice-first look at what happens when designers of environments and experiences prioritize storytelling, participation, and delight alongside legibility and function. Drawing from a variety of work including Google workplace interventions, a Salinas neighborhood identity, an Eames exhibition, and even a memorial for Harvey Milk, they will explain how architecture, graphics, and co-creative processes intersect to produce places that resonate with people beyond getting from Point A to Point B, and how these site-specific strategies can align stakeholders and embed long-term resonance into projects. 

Takeaways

• Emphasize the site-specificity of design systems to add nuance and depth
• Putting emotion first, problem-solving second, creates more resonance
• Holistic, not just cosmetic, approaches produce better results

Shoshana Wasserman
Deputy Director/Co-Curator, First Americans Museum

Kimberly Rodriguez
Communications Project Coordinator, First Americans Museum

William Smith
Principal, Design Director, Storyline Studio, LLC

This panel explores how design can respectfully and playfully engage Indigenous cultures for diverse audiences. Using the FAMily Discovery Center at First Americans Museum as a case study, speakers will discuss balancing authenticity with accessibility and how storytelling and spatial design can work together to create meaningful, joyful experiences.

Takeaways:

• Cultural narratives belong to the communities that live them.
• Play can be a bridge to complex stories.
• Genuine engagement starts with co-creation.