Humantech Meetings: Anthropology and UX Design

Christine Miller, Ph.D. – educator, researcher, and practitioner working at the intersection of anthropology, design, and business. She completed her Ph.D. at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan in an interdisciplinary doctoral program that allowed her to integrate anthropology, management/organizational studies and business. Her dissertation research - an ethnographic study of process formalization and the relationship between innovation and formalization at a Tier One automotive supplier - focused on the sociocultural and organizational dimensions of innovation processes. Her research interests include socio-technical systems and the ways in which sociality and culture influence the design and diffusion/adoption/adaptation of new products, processes, and technologies. She is also interested in communication and knowledge flows, especially between diverse groups and within collaborative innovation networks (COINs). Currently she is a Co-Principal Investigator on an NSF study of Ethics in STEM research (“A Bottom-Up Approach to Enhancing a Culture of Responsible Research and Practice in STEM”). The goal of this project is to design an alternative to traditional ethics education that incorporates a series of group conversations within STEM labs that allow ethical concerns to emerge, be examined, and articulated in a set of locally crafted guidelines that reflect the ethical culture of the lab.

Hubert Anyżewski – Experienced design, technology and innovation Founder and Managing Director. He has built and successfully managed over a dozen companies, including Uselab (acquired by Deloitte CE). He supervised the Experience Design business line for the Central European region for Deloitte Consulting CE and has extensive experience as a VC fund managing partner. A pioneer and international expert in the field of UX & Product Design. One of Google's global Product Design experts (since 2015). Hubert has completed over 500 projects for 45 markets in Europe, the US, Africa, and Asia, winning international awards including the Global Finance award for the Best Digital Banking service in the region (ING Business Online). He founded and was managing the UX Poland conference for 8 years (until 2017), one of the largest UX conferences in Europe. Since 2010, he has built and managed one of the first and largest postgraduate UX Design / Product Design study programs in the region at SWPS University. For several years he has been involved in blockchain projects. He is a speaker at many Polish and international industry conferences.

Dr. hab. Agnieszka Skala– An adjunct lecturer at the Faculty of Management at Warsaw University of Technology, Agnieszka holds a PhD in Economics. She is a graduate of the Warsaw School of Economics and the Lean LaunchPad Educators Program at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Her academic work concerns startups and education for technological entrepreneurship. She wrote the monographic study: Startupy – wyzwanie dla zarządzania i edukacji przedsiębiorczości (edu-Libri, 2018), also published in English by Palgrave Macmillan: Digital Startups in Transition Economies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). She also co-founded the Innovation Nest Entrepreneurship School (SPIN), which she has been managing since 2011. At Warsaw University of Technology, she runs her own seminar cycle on High Tech Entrepreneurship. She is a member of the Startup Poland Advisory Board as well as since 2015, the coordinator and the author of the research methodology for its annual Polish Startups study.

Ahmad Piraiee, MBA – B.Sc of hardware engineering, MBA in Strategic administration, MBA in Managerial economics, pursuing Ph.D. in Socioeconomics. Supported the first accelerator in Warsaw (warsaw accelerator), acted as the marketing manager of the oldest accelerator in the World in CEE and established all communication channels at MIT Enterprise Forum CEE, established all communication and strategy at the biggest CVC by PwC, Startup Collider in 23 countries, acted as marketing and communication manager, established all communication channels and strategy at biggest Venture Capital in Poland, powered by mBank, mAccelerator. Holder of a recommendation letter from the Hungarian Ministry of Economy for his contributions to Industry 4.0. Board member of the Committee for Innovation, Technology, and Diversity of the Polish Chamber of Commerce.

Dr. Konrad Maj (meeting host) – Social psychologist, Head of the HumanTech Meetings project, initiator and Head of the HumanTech Center for Social and Technological Innovations. In his research and teaching he focuses on social influence, media psychology and innovations. Recently, he has been working on a Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) project. From 2013 to 2016 he held the post of Rector’s Representative for Research, focusing on practical application of research results and social innovations. He visited numerous innovation centers, including the Institute for Social Innovation (ISI) at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, the ID+ Research Institute for Design, Media and Culture at the University of Averio, Portugal, and Design Factory at Aalto University, in Finland.

Dr. Max Bielecki (panel moderator) – Psychologist. Assistant professor at the Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience at SWPS University. As a statistician and psychologist, he cooperates with leading research institutions, such as the Medical University of Warsaw, the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology. His main research interests include working memory, attention, and eye-tracking studies. He has over ten years of experience in business and R&D consulting. As an expert in behavioral economics, statistics and psychometry, he collaborated with Universal McCann, Maison and Partners, UseLab, and various other companies on projects related to FMCG, finance, insurance and telecommunication.