As a senior UX and UI designer at Icon Agency, Carmen uses human-centred design to challenge assumptions and gain unique insights into her clients’ business problems. She is passionate about bringing concepts to life and delivering digital products that are functional, accessible and beautiful. Before joining Icon Agency, Carmen worked as a lead digital designer at purpose-driven development agency, a fast-growing start up and as a sole trader for social impact enterprises and nonprofits. In addition to her design experience, she has also embraced teaching opportunities at the University of Technology Sydney and Global Drive Education, helping students to develop their skills, confidence and awareness in the design and technology fields. During her spare time, Carmen enjoys the more wholesome things in life like camping, yoga and plant-based cooking as well as volunteering her time to social causes like clean-up days and being a long standing council member at the Australian Graphic Design Association.
Archives: Mentor
John Gakau
John has helped clients across a range of industries improve experiences and performance for over two decades.
He is currently Head of UX at The Home Depot QuoteCenter where he leads a team of experience strategy, research and design professionals developing and optimizing digital tools for the company’s marketplace for construction professionals.
Prior to The Home Depot, John served as Director, Experience Strategy & Design at Experience by Design, an information architecture and UX consultancy. Together with his team John helped client companies—at various stages of development (start-up, merger, strategic shift, new lines of business), and across a range of industries—successfully navigate change and digital transformations using collaborative and mature user-centered methods and tools to conceive, plan, design, and deliver better products and service experiences internally and for market.
John loves to travel to new places and experience different cultures to both refresh and to inform his perspectives and (mis)understanding of the world and its various arrangements.
“Definitions belong to the definers not the defined.”
-Toni Morrison
Justin Hamacher
Intuition and creative spirit have guided Justin’s life and career. This has taken him to some interesting places, as a Global Creative Director in UX for Fortune 500 company HARMAN International (now part of Samsung), Creative Director for the Interaction Design Foundation, full-time faculty professor at the University of Washington leading graduate design studios in the MHCID (Masters Human Computer Interaction and Design) program, and currently providing Jungian analysis to clients via his org Cascade Jungian Services in Portland Oregon. He also is an Oregon state licensed psilocybin facilitator.When not working in psychology, research or design, he is active in the creative arts. At his core he is a curious creative artist, doing pen and ink drawings of the Oregon coast, leading art processing groups at neighborhood mental health clinics and performing and composing music with his Portland based bicycle troupe, the Tidelands Traveling Theater.
Heston Miles
Heston is an accomplished UX Director with a wealth of experience spanning over two decades in research, design, animation, and development. His passion for the field shines through in his creative problem-solving approach, where he tackles complex workflows and transforms them into simple, intuitive, and elegant experiences that delight users. Starting his career in dot-com web design teams, he quickly progressed to ad agency interactive teams, honing his skills along the way. Since 2018, he has been at the forefront of leading UX practices for engineering and industrial IoT/AI applications, showcasing his expertise in creating seamless user experiences in highly specialized fields. With a track record of excellence, he has had the privilege of working with esteemed clients such as HP, Microsoft, US Marine Corps, Red Bull, PepsiCo, NBC Universal, Shell, Halliburton, McDonald's, Citigroup, Bank of America, and many more. Apart from work, Heston enjoys traveling, hiking, writing music, and working on machine learning projects.
Diego Salvatierra
Diego has taken his design expertise into the worlds of tech, education, and public policy. He is adept at using in-depth qualitative research, including interviews, personas, and user journeys, to solve thorny problems, as well as bringing those insights into web and mobile designs. At Chile’s Ministry of Education he used design thinking tactics to identify user needs and align conflicting stakeholders in national-scale projects such as the country’s largest ever expansion of school Internet. He hired UX designers and pushed the adoption of Figma to improve Ministry websites and teacher-facing apps. Diego also helped inform the redesign of microcredentials at Autodesk’s online platform, and has designed multiple web and mobile apps for education and beyond.
Diego developed his design skills at the Stanford d.school. He is currently an entrepreneur at South Park Commons, an incubator in San Francisco. When not in California, he enjoys spending time in the woods of Patagonia.
Andrew Hiles
Andrew has been designing for over 18 years – starting out as a graphic designer before moving across into digital. He’s worked on projects for household names for both agency-side and client-side.
Moving up the design ladder, Andrew now focuses his energies as Experiecne Chapter Lead at Commonwealth Bank. Andrew relishes a challenge and with solid experience leading UX teams on complex, large scale projects he’s seen his fair share of action. Andrew is a passionate customer advocate and derives his own personal satisfaction from creating experiences that make customer’s lives easier whilst adding value to the products he works on.