Executive Director, The Webby Awards and IADAS
Driven by the intrinsic strenghts and values of the Internet, participation is one of the most important ingredient in all disciplines of design today. But beyond message boards and blogs, how can a brand, and a designer build the vital component of participation into their work? David-Michel Davies, executive director of The Webby Awards, will weave a thematic overview of participatory design with practical case studies that illustrate how interactive designers can integrate play and participation into everything they make – whether it be banners and ads to full scale experiences.

Architect Evangelist Microsoft
Simon began his computing career as a PC developer then moved onto work on Mainframe and UNIX systems before returning to the PC world with the advent of Windows NT. For the last 10 years Simon has worked with organisations to help them understand how to create new applications using new platforms and technology from Microsoft.

Design Consultant to IKEA
Lars Engman is Director of the HDK School of Design and Design Consultant to IKEA. He is considered a national and international player within the field of design. For over 31 years Engman has worked in different roles within product development and design at IKEA. As their Design Manager he has developed an extensive, international IKEA network of design schools and designers. He is also a member of the board of the Swedish Institute and of the Swedish Research Council. Prior to becoming Design Manager at IKEA Lars enjoyed a varied career in design - from designer at KF Interior in Stockholm to heading the Design Studio Copenhagen for IKEA in collaboration with Niels Gammelgaard. He is also on the board of several education councils including Lund University, Växjö University and Borås University.

Author of the best-selling book “Twenty-first Century Design”
Marcus Fairs is founding editor of the international architecture and design magazine, icon. A renowned expert on design, he has spoken at conferences in London, Tokyo, New York, Stockholm and Cape Town, among others.
A furniture design graduate, Marcus wrote for a number of publications including Blueprint, The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday and Conde Nast Traveller before launching icon in 2003. Icon has rapidly established itself as one of the world’s leading architecture and design publication, winning a string of awards, including launch of the year and designer of the year in 2003 and monthly magazine of the year in 2005.
Marcus himself has won numerous awards, including journalist of the year (2002) and architectural journalist of the year (2004). He also regularly appears on radio and TV, writing and presenting a documentary about French designer Philippe Starck for the BBC in 2003 and appearing in the major BBC series Home in 2006. His first book, Twenty-first Century Design, was published by Carlton Books in October 2006 and provides an overview of cutting-edge architecture, interiors, products, furniture, clothing and graphics. Marcus lives and works in London.

Leading Business Trendspotter and Futurologist
Europe's leading business trendspotter, Ray Hammond's powerful formulation of the business of the future has earned him world renown. He is a best-selling author, whose titles have been published in 32 countries. A natural and charismatic performer, he helps business leaders to navigate their future, explaining the business implications as well as the social, political and economic issues of the modern management.

User Experience Evangelist Microsoft
Jon Harris worked as a print designer for over eight years and concentrated on the Web for five before moving to Macromedia, where he was responsible for all Macromedia's design work in the UK.
Taking all this into account a move to Microsoft might seem strange for someone with a design background. What attracted him was the seeing the same passion, excitement and drive he saw at Macromedia back in the day.
Jon is a DIY fanatic and has installed kitchens, bathrooms, and more recently built a 24sq metre three-room office entirely on his own. He is also a huge film fan, and as a member of BAFTA, he feels lucky enough to vote in the film awards each year. Last year his favourite film was The Constant Gardener.

User Experience Design Director, Microsoft
Tjeerd Hoek is Director of User Experience Design for Microsoft Windows, where he heads a team of 35 product-design experts, who manage the user experience design of the major products, features, and platform capabilities that make up Windows Vista. Broadly speaking, Hoek has helped craft the software products most people use every day on their PCs, and designed platform-level capabilities leveraged by all of the major software products that run on the Windows operating system. Throughout his career at Microsoft, he has been a passionate influencer in an internal cultural shift towards high-quality user experience-centered design. He joined Microsoft in 1994 as a product designer, and has worked on several major Microsoft product teams. Hoek has received multiple user interface patents, and is a leader in the definition of user experience guidelines. He received an M.A. in Industrial Design Engineering, cum laude, from Delft University of Technology.

Director of Creative Development, IdentityMine
Robby Ingebretsen loves to make stuff and has found that he can do just that as the Director of Creative Development for IdentityMine, a user experience consulting firm in Tacoma, Washington. Prior to making stuff in this role, Robby was a Program Manager on the Windows Presentation Foundation where he helped make WPF’s component and templating infrastructure. While at Microsoft, he also spent a lot of time thinking about workflows and ways to help developers and designers get along. Robby dreams first in XAML and then in English.

Program Manager, Microsoft
Jeff King is a Program Manager with the Web Platform and Tools Team. Jeff is currently working on Visual Web Developer 2005 where he owns the WYSIWYG design experience and various parts of the IDE. He has also been working on delivering a new series of Starter Kit sample applications for ASP.NET 2.0. Many of these kits are available now for beta preview download from www.asp.net. At Microsoft ASP.NET Connections, Jeff will present how to best leverage the new features in ASP.NET 2.0 to make your site visually look the best it can.

Senior Consultant, Futurecom interactive AG
Thorsten is a senior consultant at the leading Swiss full-service agency Futurecom interactive and manages global and EMEA–wide developer campaigns for Microsoft. With a strong background in IT his team is even engaged in application engineering for Microsoft providing showcase applications and open source ASP.NET solutions to the developer community. Albeit being an evolutionary biologist, author and nature and heritage interpreter Thorsten started to make a living on Web and IT projects 10 years ago, emigrated from Germany to Switzerland where he joined McKinsey&Company as a web consultant and eventually started as a project manager at Futurecom interactive AG.

User Experience Evangelist Microsoft
Carrie Longson is the User Experience Evangelist covering EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa). Prior to moving to this role Carrie worked within Microsoft Consulting as a UXP consultant, producing many of the WPF demos. Carrie has been working with the Expression Studio since the start, delivering presentations and training within the UK.

Creative Director, Wunderman Paris
It was in the mid-nineties that Carl was drawn away from his traditional Arts background by the lure of technology. As co-founder of several full service "on-and-off line" design companies, he has demonstrated his creative direction style and approach in a fast moving, constantly evolving field. His work spans a broad range of industries (IT, medical, financial, sports/adventure, fashion, music and luxury goods), work which was developed to address each brand’s specificities. A search for high profile interactive projects led Carl to Europe where his creative experience, strong technology background and love of crème brûlée makes him a natural for the Paris-based Wunderman/Y&R Brands team.

Director of User Experience, Cisco
Cordell has over twenty years experience designing and delivering successful products across a wide range of software, hardware, and Web applications. He has a deep knowledge of all phases of the design process including user research, conceptual design, visual and interaction design, prototyping, usability testing, and implementation.
Among a variety of design and management positions during a nine-year career at Apple Computer, Cordell served as the manager of Apple's Human Interface Group where he directed the human interface strategy and design for major releases of the Macintosh operating system, from Mac OS 8 through Mac OS X.
As Creative Director for Frog Design's digital media practice, Cordell guided the design of innovative products for clients such as Microsoft, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Cingular, Yahoo!, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Johnson & Johnson, and DaimlerChrysler.
Cordell is currently Director of User Experience at Cisco where he is leading and building a design practice for Cisco's telephony, collaboration, and video conferencing products.

Design Strategist, Adaptive Path
Brandon Schauer is a Design Strategist for Adaptive Path. He speaks on, writes about, and practices design as a means to create value. He has a decade of experience developing new user experiences on the Web, desktops, and products. His passion for finding and understanding the unmet needs of customers has led him to diverse environments, from the homes of cancer patients to tunnels beneath Walt Disney World.
Brandon holds two master-level degrees from schools with the Illinois Institute of Technology, a Master of Design from the Institute of Design in Chicago and an MBA from the Stuart School of Business. Brandon also has a love of Excel that is unnatural for a designer.

Freelance Software Developer
Kalle Vänskä is an all-round software developer mainly in the web-world, as well as doing WPF since the beginning of the UniveRSS. Among other things he doesn’t maintain his own blog.

General Manager Expression, Microsoft
Prior to becoming general manager, Expression, at Microsoft, Eric Zocher was vice president of engineering at Adobe Systems as the applications division grew from $50 million to $600 million in revenue. He was the engineering lead in Adobe's acquisition of Premiere and of Aldus Corporation, whose products included After Effects. Eric Zocher has also led the development of interactive TV applications as chief technology officer of Go2Net, reported to Steve Jobs at NeXT Computer, and was co-founder and president of Netbot, an Internet shopping search company that was acquired by Excite.

Expert in Virtual Reality and Computer Engineering
Michael Zyda is the Director of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering's GamePipe Laboratory, located at the Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, California. From Fall 2000 to Fall 2004 he was the Founding Director of The MOVES Institute, located at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at NPS as well.
Professor Zyda is a pioneer in the fields of computer graphics, networked virtual environments, modelling and simulation, and defence entertainment collaboration. Drawing upon his considerable expertise Michael offers great insights into the future of computer applications.