Speakers

Kolja is a multidisciplinary creative and strategist with over 25 years of experience in digital creation, branding, coding, and communication. He is the Head of Digital at Meiré und Meiré and in 2022, they co-founded Plateau Candy together, a studio for emergent digital practices. With a diverse background in philosophy, coding, and design, he works at the intersection of technology, digital culture, and tomorrow.

Kolja has covered a wide spectrum of roles, collaborating with global premium brands such as Porsche, Telekom, Dornbracht, BOSS, Disney, BMW, and many more. Driven by a passion for staying ahead of emerging digital practices, he partners with leading experts from various creative domains.

Irma Boom is a bookmaker based in Amsterdam. She has created over five hundred books. Her experimental approach often challenges the conventions of traditional books in both physical design and printed content. Since 1992, Boom has been senior critic at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, and she gives lectures and workshops worldwide. She has received many awards for her book designs and, in 2001, was the youngest person ever to receive the Gutenberg Prize. Boom’s books are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Vatican Library; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among other institutions. The Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam collect her complete oeuvre. In 2014, Boom received the Johannes Vermeer Award, the Dutch state prize for the arts. In 2019, she received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art, London.

Associate Director, head of MVRDV NEXT and Architect Sanne van der Burgh (NL) leads multiple teams within MVRDV, realising projects of various scales, phases, and across several continents. Van der Burgh played an integral role in high-profile MVRDV projects including the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Depot (2021), the refurbishment of the Lyon Part Dieu shopping center (2021), and a visionary project for revitalising New Delhi’s sanitation and infrastructure: Barapullah Springs (2020). Van der Burgh is a versatile architect with demonstrated design achievements. In 2019, Architizer named her as one of 25 young architects to watch. In 2021, she was the winner of the Female Frontier Awards, organised by World Architecture News. She won the category “Innovation in Architecture”. Van der Burgh regularly appears in lectures and jury’s worldwide.

Van der Burgh’s strengths lie in integral project narratives with a focus on sustainability and innovation. With her personal fascination for computational workflows and methodologies, she championed MVRDV NEXT, an in-house R&D group that focuses on the development and implementation of cutting-edge technologies in MVRDV’s projects. The involvement of MVRDV NEXT has made complex projects such as the façade of the Valley in Amsterdam possible. Currently, MVRDV NEXT focuses on the development of visionary tools that help cities become more dense, more green and more resilient. Recently, the team finished RoofScape, a tool for exploring rooftop activation policies for the Municipality of Rotterdam. A dedicated advocate for environmental awareness in architecture, urbanism, and our daily lives, Van der Burgh believes in the capacity of design to inspire and have a positive impact on people and their surroundings. In addition to MVRDV NEXT, Van der Burgh leads MVRDV’s in-house Climate team, which consults with design teams across the entire company to ensure the sustainability and resilience of all the projects.

After dumping a career in graphics, Wilfrid plunged into prop making at cult classic British tv show, Spitting Image. Here he learnt his trade as an ‘apprentice headbuilder’, starting in the Eyeballs and Blinks department and moving on to Dogs and Sheep.

25 years later he is now a portrait artist. His subjects are famous people, invented characters, strangers and friends. He spends hours studying characters in the supermarket, in the news and on the bus. Wilfrid is commissioned to make both 3D and 2D portraits, regularly drawing people in his Hackney studio.

Currently he is engaged in a series of pastel portraits, mainly of curious individuals who have made contact through Instagram and volunteered their time.

Tove Blomgren is the Creative Director of SALLY within EY Doberman, an innovation studio for building preferable futures. With over 15 years of experience designing impactful digital experiences, Tove leads a creative team in making a radically better near-future come to life through speculative design and design fiction.

Tove is a frequent speaker on regenerative design and futures thinking at leading industry events and universities.

Mitch Paone is the creative director of New York & Chamonix based creative agency DIA Studio. DIA specializes in corporate and cultural visual identity systems, graphic design, and typography. DIA's signature use of motion and generative tools has led to significant collaborations with clients such as Squarespace, Balenciaga, SAP, Nike, Saint Laurent, Apple, and many more. Additionally, Mitch lectures and leads workshops at conferences and universities worldwide. Most notably, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ECAL), The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (KABK), Pratt Institute & The School for Visual Arts in New York.

Mitch and DIA studio partner Meg Donohoe are AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) members. Mitch is also a performing jazz pianist, composer, and type designer beyond DIA and academic endeavors.

Payal is the VP of Innovation, Strategy & Design at frog. She leads an inspiring team of designers, strategists, product people and technologists – and holds dear the simple adage of “learning the most whilst everyone does the best work of their careers” at frog.

Trained as a museum designer, she’s built products, services, ventures and businesses and has been a gnarly problem solver by trade for 20 years. Focused on bridging the altitudes of strategic ambition and on-ground change, Payal enables organisations to futureproof themselves and drive holistic and conscious growth.

Customer-centricity sits at the heart of all she champions, and that sits in strong balance enabling robust business impact and ambition. Bridging the worlds of physical and digital, Payal has a proven track record across innovation in finance, healthcare, infrastructure, mobility and creative businesses. She’s curious about where the interplay between design, data and societal transformation leads us and advocates the need to go gentler into the future.

Payal’s massively into jazz, specifically bebop and reads without prejudice. Unless it’s badly typeset.