In recent years the movement for social change through design has seen an immense resurgence. Ansley is particularly interested in examining the impact of socially engaged design projects to determine whether project goals were met, and to learn about the unintended positive and negative consequences that can arise when designers engage in social change work.

Noah Scalin is a Richmond, Virginia based artist/designer/activist and creator of the Webby award-winning art project Skull-A-Day.

As executive director of the Public Policy Lab, Chelsea works with public agencies to identify service-design challenges, then assembles teams that translate complex policy considerations into pragmatic, replicable solutions.

Allan Chochinov is a partner of Core77, a New York-based design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts. He is editor in chief of Core77.com, Coroflot.com, and Designdirectory.cdom, and writes and lectures widely on the impact of design on contemporary culture.

Lara Galinsky is an author, speaker, expert on working on purpose, and senior vice president of Echoing Green, a groundbreaking nonprofit organization with the mission to unleash next generation talent to solve the world’s biggest problems.

A design writer, curator and strategist, she is desigNYC's executive director, a nonprofit whose mission is to improve the lives of New Yorkers through the power of good design. The founder of futureflair, a creative conduit that provides a critical eye on all things visual and a multi-faceted understanding of the cultural value and strategic dimensions of design.

Steven Heller is the co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author program and co-founder of the MFA in Design Criticism, MFA in Interaction Design and MPS Branding programs at the School of Visual Arts, New York. For 33 years he was an art director at the New York Times.

LOT-EK is a design studio based in New York and Naples. Founded in 1993 by Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, it has been involved in residential, commercial and institutional projects in the US and abroad, as well as exhibition design and site-specific installations for major cultural institutions and museums.

Panthea Lee is the co-founder of Reboot, a service design firm that works to improve the programs and investments of socially oriented institutions.