Meet the Judges

Keith Kirkland is the CEO and Cofounder of WearWorks, a haptic design company. The company’s first product, Wayband, is a wearable tactile navigation device that guides blind and visually impaired users to an end-destination, using only vibration. Keith is a mechanical engineer, accessories designer, and industrial designer with experience developing innovation based concepts and experiences. He has worked with organizations ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Unilever, Futureworks, Discovery, Forbes, The Yokohama Government, Coach, and the National Science Foundation. He is deeply excited about reimagining the future of tactile design while expanding the human ability to sense.

Mike Milley is the Director of Creative Consulting at BMW Group Designworks in Los Angeles. He leads a cross-disciplinary team that brings the future to life at the intersection of Research, Strategy, and Foresight. Mike has been an enthusiastic catalyst for change for over 20 years. He was the Founding Director of Samsung’s Lifestyle Research Lab, and worked on advanced design teams at Nike and Philips. He has been on the faculty of ArtCenter College for Design’s graduate Media Design Program since 2010. Mike was educated at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design.

Eleanor Morgan is SVP of Experience at Casper, where she is responsible for the design and development of Casper’s end-to-end customer experience across digital and retail touchpoints. She believes design and brand can make bedtime cool again, and leads teams to create customer experiences that make shopping for sleep and the routine around it joyful. Prior to Casper, Eleanor spent 10 years at the design firm IDEO, where she led the development of dozens of award-winning products and brand experiences for startups and Fortune 500 companies. Prior to IDEO, she worked as a product designer at Volkswagen, where she designed and engineered components of concept cars.

Elise Roy is a deaf, inclusive design strategist who helps companies analyze products, services, and programs from the vantage point of people with disabilities. She believes that the unique experiences of people with disabilities help us uncover hidden needs, wherein lie the most profound solutions for everyone. Elise draws on her 15+ years of working with the disability community, and her diverse career path as a lawyer who worked on the United Nations Disability Treaty, marketing manager, and product designer to shape solutions for her clients. An internationally recognized speaker, Elise’s TEDx talk, “When We Design for Disability, We All Benefit,” has over 1.1 million views.

Davin Stowell is the founder and CEO of Smart Design, one of the world’s premier strategic design companies that helps people live better and work smarter. An expert in consumer product and experience innovation, Davin has steered design directions for a broad range of clients, including OXO, HP, and Corning. The OXO Good Grips line he created in 1989 pioneered the concept of Universal Design in everyday products—a story that now serves as a Harvard Business School case study and is included in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and MoMA permanent collections. Smart Design was the recipient of Cooper Hewitt’s 2010 National Design Award for Product Design.

Todd Waterbury is Chief Creative Officer at Target, where he establishes the creative direction of Target’s marketing efforts, leading an internal team of art directors, designers, developers, writers, and producers, as well as its external agency and design partners, who, together, craft creative content for the Target brand. Todd has extensive experience in creating strategic, highly integrated marketing and design work for a broad roster of clients. Prior to joining Target, Todd
worked with national and international clients including Uniqlo and Twitter through his consultancy, and with brands ranging from Nike to Delta Airlines as co-executive creative director at Wieden+Kennedy. Todd’s work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim and MoMA. Todd
proudly serves on the board of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.