Introducing our design partners
The Airbel Center at the International Rescue Committee is a team of behavioral economists, human centered designers, strategists, humanitarians, and researchers working in crisis-affected contexts.
Our evidence-based approaches help us understand some of the world’s most intractable problems and the effectiveness of current interventions. This is paired with a design-led iterative approach focusing on meeting the needs and desires of people by combining the best of a variety of disciplines and methods.
As part of our multi-disciplinary focus, Airbel works with a group of expert designers who bring important perspectives and standards from the field to our work in lower-resource contexts.
Abigail Nydam
Global Director Design, iDE
Abby believes in the power of design to make the world an even more brilliant place. Starting in Project Management and eventually becoming the Director of Business Development, her client and project portfolios included consumer goods and services for both the luxury and mass markets. Abby decided to take a “gap year” from that career, and found iDE in Cambodia, and discovered a new way to implement design for good. Abby is iDE’s thought leader for implementing Human-Centered Design across our programs and is currently based within iDE Honduras but continues to work with all iDE country programs to embed innovation and design into all programming activities as well as specific per project initiatives.
Augusta Miel
Founder and Director, Agncy Design
Augusta is a designer and strategist seeking to use design to redistribute power in the systems of our country. Her practice brings together established design methods and problem-solving approaches with the philosophies and mindsets of community organizing.
Augusta founded Agncy Design to apply and adapt human-centered design practices to the social sector. The firm’s first experiment was a 2.5-year focus on education in the City of Boston, identifying partners and opportunities to tackle structural inequities. Through this effort, it has worked with organizations such as Boston Public Schools, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and Chiefs for Change, as well as a host of community organizations including City Hall, philanthropists and local foundations, private industry, and non-profits.
Chris Larkin
Director of Impact, Ideo.org
Chris Larkin has worked in social and behaviour change research and programming for the past 15 years. She has a background in social and organizational psychology, and has led research and evaluation with a number of organizations leveraging innovative approaches in communications, brand, technology and design for social impact. These have included BBC Media Action, Girl Effect and, currently, IDEO.org.
Chris is a mixed-methods researcher, with extensive experience in delivering and commissioning research to inform the design and development of programs, as well as measurement for learning and optimization. Her past portfolio includes programs tackling gender norms, climate resilience, reproductive health and civic engagement, primarily in developing contexts.
Colin O’Donnell
Entrepreneur, Technologist, and Product Designer
Colin is passionate about cities, the people who live in them, and how emerging technologies can solve epic challenges and improve the quality of life.
As an entrepreneur, technologist, and product designer, he has founded several companies that bridge the digital and physical space, including Control Group, Intersection, and CityBridge. His most recent organization is responsible for LinkNYC, a first-of-its-kind platform that replaced thousands of unused phone booths with internet hotspots and connected millions of New Yorkers to the fastest free internet on the planet. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts MFA Interaction Design program; is a Board Member of Kaboom!, a national nonprofit dedicated to making sure kids in marginalized areas have access to places to play; and shares his thoughts on the future of cities on TechCrunch.
He is currently working on a new co-living startup that aims to create flexible and affordable housing, with a focus on community.
An avid hiker, biker, climber, snowboarder, and traveler, he’s always eager to get outside and be active with his wife, Amanda, and their two children.
Katie Skibinski
Vice President of Digital Products, Planned Parenthood
Katie Skibinski is the Vice President of Digital Products at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where she oversees the cross-functional team responsible for PlannedParenthood.org, PlannedParenthoodAction.org, our online appointment scheduling tool, a live chat/text program, the Spot On period and birth control tracking app, and Roo, our sexual health chatbot for teens. Prior to joining Planned Parenthood, Katie worked for 15+ years in digital product management for LinkNYC, Huge, POP, and the New York Times. Katie just made the move from Brooklyn to the Jersey ‘burbs with her husband, toddler son, and newborn daughter.
Krystina Castella
Professor, Designer and Author
Krystina is a professor of industrial design and business at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, USA. Krystina has practiced as a designer and has taught at ArtCenter College of Design across disciplines for almost three decades. Her research and teaching center around designing for play, the intersection between design and ethical business, designing for social innovation, and sustainable materials and manufacturing innovation.
Author of 11 books, Krystina’s most recent book is Designing for kids: Creating for playing, learning, and growing.
Maggie Breslin
Director, The Patient Revolution
Maggie is the director of The Patient Revolution, an action and advocacy movement for careful and kind patient care. She and her team work towards a vision of a healthcare future defined by unhurried conversations, seeing people in high definition, and care plans that make intellectual, emotional, and practical sense.
She has spent 15+ years as a designer and researcher in the healthcare space, including 7 years at the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation. Her focus has been on the development and implementation of communication tools and programs that aim to foster conversations in exam rooms, hospital rooms, homes and public spaces about our lives and our health.
She teaches in the Design for Social Innovation program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in NYC. She has published in journals ranging from Design Issues to Archives of Internal Medicine. Maggie holds a Masters of Design (MDes) from Carnegie Mellon University.
Mari Nakano
Design Director, NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity
Mari Nakano has been practicing what design can do for products, services, and teams in the social impact space for over 13 years. She currently serves as the Design Director at the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity. Her role is to build strategies to help scale design thinking and cross-collaborative practices across the City. She leads the Service Design Studio Team, which aims to build up the capacity of government colleagues to understand and apply service design methodologies to improve services, programs and processes through evidence-based, user-centered and creative approaches.
She also oversees Designing for Opportunity projects which are deep partnerships with City agencies focused on tackling issues around poverty and inequity. Prior to this role, Mari served as the Design Lead for UNICEF’s Office of Innovation. She has extensive experience shaping how design functions and adds value in multi-disciplinary government and non-governmental spaces.
Mari holds an M.F.A. in Media Design Practices from ArtCenter College of Design, and a B.A. in Asian American Studies and minor in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. She also currently serves as a faculty thesis advisor at the School of Visual Arts, Design in Social Innovation graduate program.
Matthew Manos
Founder verynice
Called “crazy or genius” by Forbes, and recognized as one of the 100 most influential creatives working today by HOW Magazine, Matthew Manos is the Founder of verynice. verynice is a design strategy consultancy with client experience spanning 700+ brands including the American Heart Association, Disney, Mozilla, UNICEF, and Google. Matthew is also the author of numerous books and toolkits on the intersections of creativity, design, and social enterprise.
He is an Assistant Dean and Assistant Professor at the USC Iovine and Young Academy, a school that brings together design, business, and technology in order to create the next generation of creative problem solvers.
Melanie Kahl
Facebook Community Leadership Program
Melanie believes in the power of design to shape meaningful organizations, communities, environments, and services. She has over ten years of experience leading interdisciplinary creative teams on social innovation projects across five continents. Currently, Melanie designs and runs the Facebook’s Community Leadership Program residency, investing in community leaders who use online tools to make offline impact and helping to shape future programs and tools for digital community builders.
Most recently, Melanie was a senior creative and portfolio lead in Dalberg Design’s New York Studio. At Dalberg Design, she led design and strategy projects in urban resilience, gender, health, customer-centered design, and organizational innovation. Her clients and collaborators include the World Bank, Rockefeller Foundation, Sustainable Trade Initiative, UNICEF, the Global Fund, Elton John AIDS Foundation, Clinton Global Initiative, and USAID. She recently led work to support adoption of the first women-controlled, HIV-prevention pharmaceutical product in sub-Saharan Africa (dapivirine ring). She also led Dalberg Design’s signature collaboration with World Bank/CGAP, creating toolkits, research, and pilot projects to promote customer-centric financial services for low-income customers.
Prior to Dalberg, Melanie worked in design for education — creating innovative school models, design-based curricula, and collaborative learning spaces with Perkins+Will, Chicago Public Schools, and Cannon Design’s The Third Teacher+ consultancy.
She holds a degree in social policy, business, and leadership development from Northwestern University and has done fellowship and professional programs with Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, StartingBloc, and Experience Institute. She’s coached and lectured at Northwestern University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, The New School, School of Visual Arts, and Design for America college studios. Melanie enjoys serving locally as an Awesome Foundation Trustee and an Ambassador to the Women in Innovation network in New York City.
Ulrik Hogrebe
Design Director, WeWork
Ulrik is a Design Director at WeWork where he spends his time leading teams, making digital products and thinking about the future of work. In previous iterations, he has been a Creative Director at frog design, where he led the interaction design discipline, the Creative Director of BBC News and The World Service in London, where he built both external and internal tools and services for every market under the sun. Further, he’s worked as a design strategist at the Copenhagen-based strategic design studio e-Types, holds a Masters Diploma in Interaction design, a BA in Business Strategy and Communications — and teaches periodically at his old school, The Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, where he runs a week long workshop in Future Casting with the explicit intent of helping practitioners tell more critical, inclusive and diverse stories about what the future could be. Ulrik spent most of his young life traveling with his mother; living in Mexico, Bangladesh, Tanzania and Mozambique — a penchant for travel that sticks with him to this day.
