Surya Vanka

Surya Vanka is the founder of Authentic Design and the Chair-elect of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), as well as an advising founder of the Global Impact Collective. Before these roles, he served as the director of user experience at Microsoft for over a decade, was a tenured professor of design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study. Surya also held the position of President of the Seattle Design Festival, chaired the 50th Anniversary of the design conference, and was the chair of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) Interaction Week. He is renowned for creating DesignSwarms®, a modern design method now widely adopted across business, non-profit, and educational sectors globally. Surya resides in Seattle, Washington, USA.