Talk UX: Redesigning Place

Clara Kliman-Silver

UX Strategist

Google

Clara Kliman-Silver is a UX strategist based in New York City. Currently, she works as a UX research manager on the Material Design team at Google and collaborates with local UX communities, including Ladies That UX. Her research focuses on the emergent role of artificial intelligence in UX design, metrics frameworks for measuring product development, and developer experience.

Read about Clara’s talk.

Rhea Ebanks-Simpson

Senior User Researcher

Westminster City Council

Rhea is a Senior User Researcher within Westminster City Council with experience from across the public and charity sector.

While her academic specialism is ethnographic research with vulnerable groups, user research has led her to exploring GenAI, and service and digital transformations in local government settings. She’s passionate about helping services turn user insights into delivery and tangible results. 

Rhea is co-presenting with Rebecca Gordon-Watts.

Sandra González

Product Strategy Leader, Founder and Director 

UX for Change

Sandra González is an award-winning product strategy leader and advisor, and the Founder and Director of UX for Change. For over a decade, this global initiative has connected purpose-driven organisations with the UX community in cities including London, Sydney, and NYC.

Currently, Sandra is focused on scaling global collaboration and redistributing responsible design knowledge through the Responsible Design for Change Fellowship.

She is also a Pluralsight author and has contributed to works by best-selling authors such as Nir Eyal and Trenton Moss. Her impact on the UX field is recognised in In Through the Side Door: Fifty Years of Women in Interaction Design (MIT Press) by Erin Malone.

Dhiraj Vishwakarma

UX Researcher

Dhiraj Vishwakarma is a UX Researcher based in London who’s equal parts curious, strategic, and delightfully nosy about how people think, behave, and interact with the world around them. They see users as the ultimate experts and bring their stories to life through clear, actionable insights that guide product decisions. Dhiraj’s knack for storytelling helps teams connect deeply with user experiences and create meaningful, user-centred solutions. 

Marley Dizney Swanson

Senior UX Researcher

MPB

Marley Dizney Swanson is the Senior UX Researcher at MPB, the world’s largest platform for buying, selling and trading used photography and videography equipment. A mixed-methods researcher with a background in development work, they are trained in measuring real-world outcomes, not just outputs. They approach UX research with the same rigour, evaluating how design, product and service changes can improve people’s lives. 

As a Co-Organiser of LTUX Brighton, Marley has hosted events like CV Saturday and Building a Compelling Case Study and Portfolio. They have also spoken at several events including UXinsight, UX Camp Brighton and Dead Product Society. They have mentored 30+ researchers, helping early-career researchers launch and shape their careers with confidence. 

Marley’s work is grounded in a simple principle: research should improve lives, not just interfaces.

Julia Petretta

Product Design Manager

Julia Petretta is a Product Design Manager with a background in experience design and business innovation. She’s led teams at Thoughtworks, Plum, and Accenture, focusing on complex product challenges that balance customer value with business impact.

A strong advocate for design systems and collaboration, Julia also mentors on ADPList and co-organises Ladies That UX in Brighton. 

Lilymae Prescott

Senior UX Designer

Lilymae is a Senior UX Designer, currently at Sky Sports crafting experiences that fans love. Prior to this, she worked with some of the world’s top brands to deliver digitally transformative solutions, including NatWest, Nissan, and M&S. Her academic journey started in philosophy before switching to design, graduating from Loughborough University in User Experience Design in 2021 during the pandemic. 
 

Passionate about sharing her knowledge and inspiring the next generation of designers, Lilymae actively participates in public speaking, panel discussions, insight events, webinars, and mentoring emerging talent. 

She was awarded WeAreTheCity’s Rising Star Award in 2024 and named one of the Sport Industry Group’s 30 Under 30 Leaders for 2025. 

Cindy Yeh

Product Design Leader

Cindy is a Product Design Leader with 10+ years of experience shaping design strategy, building brilliant teams, and creating thoughtful, user-centred solutions. She’s led design initiatives that not only make users happy but also drive real business impact — think better retention, happier customers, and stronger products. 

Read about Cindy’s talk.

Rebecca Gordon-Watts

Head of Online Customer Experience

Westminster City Council

Rebecca Gordon-Watts leads award-winning digital transformation in local government. With a background in cloud consulting, Rebecca has spent seven years delivering services that put people first — from scaling AI-powered platforms to designing with residents at the heart. She is passionate about inclusive innovation, mentoring future leaders, and reshaping public services to be fairer, faster and more human.

Rebecca is co-presenting with Rhea Ebanks-Simpson.

Ghaith Nassar

Intuitive Designer

Ghaith Nassar is a UK-based intuitive designer with a background in architecture, systems thinking, and service design. Drawing on their lived experience as a queer Palestinian, they bring a planet-centred, systems-aware lens to complex challenges — from public services to climate policy. At Connected Places Catapult, they’ve led strategic projects shaping how communities, government and industry collaborate on issues including inclusive innovation and net-zero goals. Known for turning ambiguity into clarity, Ghaith builds alignment, facilitates with empathy, and mentors others in participatory design. Their work spans the UK and Palestine and includes research, facilitation, and community-led strategy. They believe design should be systemic, inclusive, and intuitive.

Eniola Ayedun

User Support Advocate

Eniola Ayedun brings a distinctive lens to the world of user experience, leveraging a Masters in UX Design and prior experience as a UX Practitioner. Currently a User Support Officer at a data consultancy in Brighton, she has discovered that the front lines of user support are an invaluable, often overlooked, source of deep user insights. 

Eniola is passionate about translating user pain points into actionable design improvements and advocates for a more integrated approach to CX, demonstrating how design thinking can proactively streamline support interactions and enhance the entire user journey.

Daniel Burka

Product Manager and Designer

Hard Problems

Daniel Burka is a product manager and designer who focuses on solving complex global health problems in simple ways. He is the director of product and design at the not-for-profit Resolve to Save Lives, where he founded the open source project, Simple. Simple is used by thousands of hospitals in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia to manage over 5 million patients with hypertension and diabetes. He also works on the digitization of primary care in Rwanda.

In 2021, Daniel founded the open source project Healthicons.org to provide free icons to healthcare projects around the world. And in 2024, he co-founded Hard Problems. Previously, Daniel worked in Silicon Valley as a founder of tech startups Digg, Pownce, and Tiny Speck (became Slack) and was a design partner at Google Ventures for 5 years. He co-founded the Canadian design agency silverorange, which is now over 25 years old. 

Daniel is co-presenting with Mahima Chandak. 

Shivani Sundar

Service & Product Designer

Shivani is a service and product designer with a human-first mindset. She began her journey in graphic and UI design, but her curiosity for the “why” behind the “what” gradually drew her into UX and service design. Today, she sees herself as an end-to-end designer who crafts thoughtful, feasible, and innovative solutions that serve people over users. For Shivani, design is about more than aesthetics; it’s about the impact it creates and the relationships it nurtures. Empathy sits at the core of her work, and she approaches every challenge as an empathetic problem solver who values collaboration, creativity, and purpose. 

Himanshu Mewada

Interior architect

Himanshu Mewada started his career in design with a curiosity about learning how to communicate with people when it came to new ideas in the rapidly evolving fields of design and technology. New design fields advance possibilities for societal development. Where in that process is the possibility for people to enact their own creativity in a rapidly evolving world? Can an individualised approach to understanding design reach an upcoming generation of design professionals through a medium of learning and research?

Rai Gethers

Human-centred Strategist and founder

Holistic+Kin

Rai Gethers is a human-centered strategist, and the founder of Holistic+Kin—a platform dedicated to advancing inclusive innovation and holistic well-being. With a background in UX and accessibility-focused design, Rai bridges the gap between technology and humanity, ensuring digital systems serve people with empathy and equity at the core.

Read about Rai’s talk.

Lauren Pope

Content Strategist and Content Designer

Lauren Pope is an independent content strategist and content designer. She helps charities, cultural organisations, and nonprofits create content that works towards a better, fairer, more beautiful world. She’s worked in content and digital since 2007 and has delivered projects for some of the world’s biggest brands, including Adidas, American Express and Microsoft. She started her own consultancy—La Pope—in 2018 to focus on helping organisations that put people and planet before profit realise the potential of content strategy and design.

Beth Granter

Digital Transformation and Advocacy 

Beth taught herself how to build websites back in 1997, as a teenager. After completing an MA in Digital Media at the University of Sussex, she went on to work at agencies as a Digital Consultant, and has been freelance for the past ten years.

Beth specialises in digital transformation and advocacy campaigns for non-profits, and enjoys helping organisations to make decisions based on data. Her work covers UX research, content strategy, training, and digital product management. She has worked with the BBC, Channel 4, Terrence Higgins Trust, Mind, Oxfam, RSPCA and the University of Sussex.

Beth delivered the research and strategy for Wellbeing of Women’s “Just a Period” campaign, which won Third Sector Comms Campaign of the Year 2024.

Alex Edwards

Design Strategist

Clearleft

Alex focuses on simplifying design to meet user needs effectively. With a background in visual design, typography, and front-end development, she brings a well-rounded perspective to her work. After studying design at the University of Reading, Alex started her career as a UX designer in a digital agency, where she eventually led a team. Now at Clearleft, she integrates her design skills with insights from client services, balancing business goals with user needs. Her attention to detail and collaborative approach inform her work in creating meaningful user experiences. 

Alex is co-presenting wtih Lucy Blackwell. 

Mahima Chandak

Product Designer

Hard Problems

Mahima is a product designer who has spent her career tackling complex healthcare challenges at scale. She has led the design of tools and services that support frontline health workers and strengthen public health systems across India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia. Her work includes a hypertension and diabetes management system adopted by governments, a primary & preventive care service aimed at improving health outcomes for large populations in India, and an AI-powered oral cancer screening tool piloted ahead of national rollout.

Earlier, Mahima ran an innovation and design consultancy with a few others, helping companies through their zero to one journey. She is now a co-founder at Hard Problems, where she brings together technologists and designers who want to apply their skills to urgent global issues like public health and climate change. Mahima cares deeply about creating solutions that advance equitable health outcomes and make care work better for those delivering and receiving it.

Mahima is co-presenting with Daniel Burka. 

Sharon Webster

User Researcher and Inclusive Design Advocate

Sharon’s journey into UX began with a simple favour: taking notes during a usability study. That moment sparked a lasting passion for user research and for making it accessible, inclusive, and ethical. 

With experience both agency-side and in-house, Sharon has worked across a wide range of industries. She brings a fresh, strategic perspective to business challenges through user research, and is driven by curiosity, continuous learning, as well as a strong commitment to doing what’s right by users. 

Zaianne Sparrow

Senior Product Designer and UX Strategist

Zaianne Sparrow is a senior product designer and UX strategist with over 15 years of experience shaping intelligent, emotionally aware experiences across AI, productivity, health tech, and consumer products. She has led end-to-end design for both global brands and early-stage startups, most notably reimagining the Samsung S Pen as a multimodal AI tool and guiding MVPs from concept to launch. Her work blends systems thinking with storytelling, grounded in a strong belief that good design should simplify complexity and center human connection.

Zaianne is passionate about designing trust into AI experiences and exploring how emerging technologies reshape the way we communicate, create, and collaborate. She is also an active mentor and community builder, serving Chapter Lead of Ladies That UX San Francisco and supporting initiatives that elevate women in tech. 

Chloe Ward-Smith

Product Designer and Product manager

DabApps

With a background in Fine Art, Chloe spent over a decade in the Fashion Industry as a Clothing and Accessory designer, including six years at H&M in Stockholm. 

Chloe’s been at DabApps, a Brighton based software agency, for four years in a split role as Product Designer and Project Manager. They lead cross-functional teams, and serve as a liaison between clients and internal functions.

Read about Chloe’s workshop.

Sayani Mitra

User Experience Researcher and Deesign Strategist

Sayani Mitra has a deep interest in how futures thinking can enhance creative problem solving. With a background in technology ethics and a practice rooted in systems thinking, she helps teams navigate complex challenges through strategic research, speculative design, and foresight. Sayani combines rigorous research with imaginative exploration to uncover insights that inform more resilient, equitable, and forward-looking outcomes.

Arda Awais

Multidisciplinary Designer and Creative Technologist

Arda Awais is an award winning multidisciplinary designer and creative technologist building new experiences. She is the co-founder of Identity 2.0 and works across the creative industry. 

Previously she has worked with the likes of Goethe Institut, Tate, Dove and Soho House. She has been named a #WebChampion by Tim Berners-Lee, awarded the BIMA 100 award in the creators and designers category for Britain’s most influential in tech and selected to be a Design Council expert to work on projects accelerating the #DesignforPlanet mission.

Lucy Blackwell

Head of UX, Research and Design

University of the Arts London

Lucy joined the University of the Arts London earlier this year, to form and lead the UX, Research and Design team at UAL with a focus on improving the student experience. Hugely passionate about the education sector, Lucy has a long history leading the UX and design of learning products from BBC Learning, to the online learning platform FutureLearn, to the community-driven Wikipedia. She is well versed in using systems thinking to create change in complex environments, whilst empowering teams to do their best work. 

Lucy is co-presenting wtih Alex Edwards. 

Ellen de Vries

Content Strategist and Brand Language Specialist

Ellen de Vries is a content strategist and brand language specialist. For over 15 years she’s been helping organisations centre on authentic language to design systems and services that are fit for purpose. 

She’s worked with large charities, arts organisations, government departments and brands like English Heritage and The Ethical Tea Partnership. Alongside her role at Mid Sussex County Council, recent collaborations include work with a local farming community, a local circular economy project, and a reforestation programme in the Congo basin. 

Ellen’s practice sees language as a living resource, a fundamental meeting point between humans and their environment. All too often it is abstracted to the point where it is no longer clear enough to work with. 

She studied with the School of Systems Change in 2024 and is now discovering ways to bring her work to support communities as they find their language strategies for regeneration and resilience.