@dcservicejam #GSJam #dcsj2022
2018 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.
Coaches:
Valerio Zanini
Valerio loves to build new products and services that help customers solve their needs and live happier lives. With many years of experience in digital product innovation at Capital One, Cisco, and a few other companies in between, he always starts by connecting with the customers' needs and aspirations. His passion is for building working prototypes and iterate on these with customer input until the best solution is found. An entrepreneur at heart, he is passionate about developing teams and creating digital products that customers love.
Peter Khanahmadi
Peter is a Sr. Fellow for Service Design at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). He’s infusing Service Design methods and techniques to enhance cross-channel experiences for financially harmed consumers submitting complaints. Prior to joining CFPB he led the Service Design capability at Booz Allen Hamilton helping clients from health, finance, and defense transform their organization. When he’s not creating great user experiences, he likes to play golf, cook, and edit videos in hopes one day he’ll strike it rich as a filmmaker.
Yvonne Tran
Yvonne asks a lot of questions and that has brought her into being a design strategist and storyteller where reframing problems becomes second nature. She has a history of working in social impact organizations and uses service design as a core part of prioritizing people at the center of problem solving. She has previously worked in web development for B Corp companies, at San Francisco’s Mayor Office of Civic Innovation, and helped entrepreneurs and businesses drive innovation through design strategy.
John Gray Parker
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John Gray is a service design geek and design strategist with Maga Design. His work spans government and commercial sectors where he orchestrates solutions to complex multi stakeholder problems. In his spare time he enjoys racing sailboats.
More to come...
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.
Coaches:
Valerio Zanini
Valerio loves to build new products and services that help customers solve their needs and live happier lives. With many years of experience in digital product innovation at Capital One, Cisco, and a few other companies in between, he always starts by connecting with the customers' needs and aspirations. His passion is for building working prototypes and iterate on these with customer input until the best solution is found. An entrepreneur at heart, he is passionate about developing teams and creating digital products that customers love.
Peter Khanahmadi
Peter is a Sr. Fellow for Service Design at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). He’s infusing Service Design methods and techniques to enhance cross-channel experiences for financially harmed consumers submitting complaints. Prior to joining CFPB he led the Service Design capability at Booz Allen Hamilton helping clients from health, finance, and defense transform their organization. When he’s not creating great user experiences, he likes to play golf, cook, and edit videos in hopes one day he’ll strike it rich as a filmmaker.
Yvonne Tran
Yvonne asks a lot of questions and that has brought her into being a design strategist and storyteller where reframing problems becomes second nature. She has a history of working in social impact organizations and uses service design as a core part of prioritizing people at the center of problem solving. She has previously worked in web development for B Corp companies, at San Francisco’s Mayor Office of Civic Innovation, and helped entrepreneurs and businesses drive innovation through design strategy.
John Gray Parker
​
John Gray is a service design geek and design strategist with Maga Design. His work spans government and commercial sectors where he orchestrates solutions to complex multi stakeholder problems. In his spare time he enjoys racing sailboats.
More to come...
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.
Coaches:
Yvonne Tran
Yvonne asks a lot of questions and that has brought her into being a design strategist and storyteller where reframing problems becomes second nature. She has a history of working in social impact organizations and uses service design as a core part of prioritizing people at the center of problem solving. She has previously worked in web development for B Corp companies, at San Francisco’s Mayor Office of Civic Innovation, and helped entrepreneurs and businesses drive innovation through design strategy.
Peter Khanahmadi
Peter is a Sr. Fellow for Service Design at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). He’s infusing Service Design methods and techniques to enhance cross-channel experiences for financially harmed consumers submitting complaints. Prior to joining CFPB he led the Service Design capability at Booz Allen Hamilton helping clients from health, finance, and defense transform their organization. When he’s not creating great user experiences, he likes to play golf, cook, and edit videos in hopes one day he’ll strike it rich as a filmmaker.
Maia Sciupac
Maia Sciupac is part of the Innovation Delivery Team at Booz Allen Hamilton. Prior to joining Booz Allen, she co-founded a design strategy firm, called Create&, which trains future makers in design thinking, and crowdsources big ideas for social impact ventures. Maia’s background also includes working in the anti-human trafficking field for over ten years, using human-centered design, product development, and tech innovation. Her current interests include blockchain technology, Bikram Yoga, and co-organizing Unleaded, a design sprint meetup in the Washington DC Metro Area. Maia received her MBA from Johns Hopkins University and a BA, summa cum laude, from UC Berkeley.
Yosef Shuman
A seasoned jammer,
service design strategist,
and new to DC.
His hobbies include
rock climbing, improv acting,
and writing haiku.
Serena Gruia
Serena has 20+ years in the fields of visual and experience design; leading, collaborating with, and facilitating teams. An advocate for creativity and community, she founded the Design Marathon in 2008 to bring designers together to make an impact in the nonprofit sector. Over 40 nonprofits have benefitted from this day-of-giving by practitioners and students. Serena founded Creative Might in 2016 to bring design thinking practice to organizations through seminars and workshops. Serena believes that meaningful and innovative outcomes begin by valuing compassion, culture, and creativity.
Valerio Zanini
Valerio loves to build new products and services that help customers solve their needs and live happier lives. As a partner at Hard Yards and with many years of experience in digital product innovation at Capital One, Cisco, and a few other companies, he always starts by connecting with the customers' needs and aspirations. His passion is for building working prototypes and iterate on these with customer input until the best solution is found. An entrepreneur at heart, he is passionate about developing teams and creating digital products that customers love.
Hillary LP Eason
​
Hillary is a technologist and design strategist who specializes in supporting innovation and appropriate technology usage in low-resource environments. Over the course of her career, she has worked with clients and users ranging from Fortune 100 companies to refugee clinics to design, develop, and deploy better and more user-centered programs and tools; she's currently putting that background to good use as a member of the Knowledge, Innovation, and Technology team at Chemonics. She is passionate about good food, educational access, and user research that goes beyond Post-Its.
Aaron Kurth
Aaron is a Service Designer at Fannie Mae working to enhance the home buying experience. Previously, he worked as a design engineer/industrial designer on projects ranging from designing AV products to optimizing manufacturing processes before attending graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University to pursue his passion for Design Research and Service Design. As a continuous learner, he studies improv comedy, sketch-writing, cooking, and furniture building in his free time.
Cameron Hanson
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Cameron is a service designer currently focused on improving the customer experience at Veterans Affairs. She comes to design by way of advertising and holds an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons. Her design heart lies in social impact; particularly in innovating grassroots ways to create change. Food waste, organizational change, and neighborliness are the topics Cameron loves best. She’s most happy when she’s biking around her new city, playing basketball, and hosting dinner parties.
Anthony DeThomas
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Have you ever bumped your shin on a coffee table? That's what Anthony feels like when organizations miss the opportunity to take a human-centered approach to product and service design. Before joining Peer Insight, Anthony founded a healthy desserts startup through an incubator program at Georgetown University. As an entrepreneur, he honed his scientific yet scrappy approach to customer and experience development. Prior to pivoting to human-centered design, Anthony tackled challenges like crafting the marketing strategy for a biotechnology startup, and congressional speech writing and policy management. Anthony holds an MS in Biotechnology from Georgetown University and a BA in English from Ohio State University.
Megan Hamilton
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Megan Hamilton is a design strategist on the Card Design team at Capital One. With a background in engineering and art, and an MS in Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech, she is passionate about understanding and solving problems at the seams of people, money and technology.
Presenters:
Rebecca Villalobos​
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Rebecca loves to solve problems. Her passion lies in collaborative problem-solving with the people impacted by them most.
After discovering the world of social enterprise and human-centered design, she ran a social impact incubator in Tulsa, OK, working with community foundations, non-profits, entrepreneurs and citizens to launch ventures in response to community problems.
Currently, she feeds her love of design and impact as the HCD technical advisor at Pact, a global non-profit working to create measurably better solutions that empower communities through health, economic development, and governance. She travels globally to promote, socialize and institutionalize the use of HCD at Pact HQ and across its 30 country offices. She also consults with small start-ups focused on women’s economic empowerment and ethical supply chains.
When she’s not thinking about how to solve the world’s problems through design, she’s enjoying a good coffee, trying to learn Spanish, and (mostly) finishing her Master’s degree in Social Enterprise.
Veronica X. Vela​
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Veronica X. Vela is a service designer and creative director with a focus on improving the well-being and health of communities.
She directs human centered design research and strategy; creates thoughtful services and products; and leads by doing, delegating and collaborating.
She is an alumnus of the Human Innovation Fellowship at The Lab @ OPM and a former Teach for America corps member.