John Burger has more than 20 years of experience in managing teams of professionals, projects, communication and change in international enterprises. After a study in chemistry in Amsterdam, with research in brain and behaviour sciences and didactics as subsidiary subjects, he did a few years of scientific research at the University of Edinburgh.

In previous years he worked for ABN AMRO, Akzo Nobel and Elsevier Science Publishers. He feels that the combination of scientific rationality and intuitive reasoning helps him to apply a “whole-brain” approach to communication issues.

John has been working as director corporate communication at Ziggo in Utrecht since the launch of the new brand in 2008, building on the twin pillars of reputation management and employee engagement. In March 2012 Ziggo became listed on the NYSE in Amsterdam after a successful IPO.

Ann Mehl knows a thing or two about forging your own path. Having worked with Andersen Consulting, Citigroup Asset Management and Sextant Search Partners in New York, she broke away to begin her own private coaching practice in 2005. Bringing together her experience in recruitment, sports psychology and the development of human potential, Ann Mehl works with her coaching clients to unearth their true potential. With compassion, insight and a good dose of common sense, Ann helps clients facilitate life change and develop forward momentum through one-on-one sessions. Having run her first Boston Marathon over sixteen years ago, Ann has since completed over fifty marathons worldwide. She is a graduate of Boston College, The Human Performance Institute and a Martha Beck-certified Coach.

When not training in Central Park, Ann relishes in volunteering for Girls On The Run, a non-profit organization dedicated to the health and well-being of adolescent girls ranging in age from eight to fourteen. Ann is a sought-after guest speaker, blogger, coaching and wellness expert. Her articles have appeared in Women's Running, Beliefnet, Body+Soul, Woman's World, Betty Confidential, Women's Adventure Magazine and she is also a radio contributor, appearing on Martha Stewart's Whole Living program.

Cristina is co-founder of XCOOP (2009), a think tank that through its flexible and permeable approach, analyzes contemporary living and provides creative solutions within a wide range of disciplines. Through XCOOP, Cristina moved deeper into the understanding of dynamics between social circumstances and the built environment. Cristina is developing a creative collaboration with India, China and Central America facilitating creative exchanges that induce innovative design concepts. More specifically, the appetite for bettering living conditions is challenging Cristina and XCOOP to generate an Urban Toolbox, which intends to monitor the development of projects to ensure that each and every being involved fulfills his/her expectations. Presently, Cristina is designing an Integrated Sustainable Masterplan for Central America.

Cristina started her career at OMA and worked with Rem Koolhaas on several projects. Also, she has been guest professor at the University of Central America of San Salvador (El Salvador), UNICA of Cagliari (Italy) and she is guest professor now at the TUDelft and Guest Critic at the MIARD, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam.

Every technology possesses its own inherent accidents. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist/theorist who focuses on visual artifacts created by accidents in both analogue and digital media. The visuals she makes are the result of glitches, compressions, feedback and other forms of noise. Although many people perceive these accidents as negative experiences, Menkman emphasizes their positive consequences.

By combining both her practical as well as her academic background, Menkman merges her abstract pieces within a grand theory of artifacts (a glitch studies). Besides the creation of a formal "Vernacular of File Formats", within her static work, she also creates work in her Acousmatic Videoscapes. In these Videoscapes she strives to connect both sound and video artifacts conceptually, technically and sometimes narratively.

In 2011 Rosa wrote the Glitch Moment/um, a book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts (published by the Institute of Network Cultures), organized the GLI.TC/H festivals in both Chicago and Amsterdam and co-curated the Aesthetics symposium of Transmediale 2012. Besides this, Rosa Menkman is pursuing a PhD at Goldsmiths, London under the supervision of Matthew Fuller and Geert Lovink.

Robin examines the interface between technology and law. She is doing her PhD research on safeguarding public interests in the standardization of the new energy we all will use in the near future.

Her focus is on the evolution of smart grid systems. In this research Robin examines the huge role standardization plays in the organization of society, and explores how general societal interests can be safeguarded in this field.

Energy is not the only world problem she occupies herself with; she co-founded the foundation ‘Variation on the Menu’ (Variatie op de Kaart) to address the overconsumption of meat in the Netherlands.

Dimitri Goossens is a historian and philosopher. He has been a teacher at a secondary school since 1997. First, he has been attached as a teacher in history, aesthetics, art history, sociology, media and philosophy to the Royal Atheneum of Schaarbeek (Brussels). Now, he works at the College of Essen.

He is preparing for his PhD in art philosophy at the Free University of Brussels under the supervision of Em. Prof. Dr. A. Van den Braembussche and Prof. Dr. D. Lesage about the possibility of a sacred experience in shocking art and images of death and its representations of the body.

‘Think from the center. Design for the edge’

Andrei has been designing software for more than two decades. He was the lead designer behind the Adobe Creative Suite and the product lead for Adobe Lightroom. He was Chief Design Officer for Involution Studios, a digital product design company based in the United States and led the 2010 redesign of Yahoo! Mail.

Since 2011 Andrei is the Director of Design at Twitter, helping to design world class products across web browsers, desktop clients, mobile smartphones and tablet computers. His writing and thoughts on design can be found at Design by Fire (http://www.designbyfire.com).

‘Data by itself is not enough, data needs poetry’

Ever since his first experiences with the humble ZX81 Brendan has continued to explore the interplay of people, code, design and art through his work and on brendandawes.com - a personal space where he publishes projects created from an eclectic mix of digital and analog objects. He worked as Creative Director of magneticNorth leading the team to realize digital solutions for clients such as BBC, Diesel, Kellogs and Coca-Cola. He co-founded Beep Industries in 2011, creating physical products including MoviePeg and Popa.

In 2008 the MoMA in New York acquired Brandan’s Cinema Redux project for the permanent collection. In 2009 he was listed among the top twenty web designers in the world by .Net magazine and was featured in the "Design Icon" series in Computer Arts. Also that year, he won a D&AD for interface design and released The Accidental News Explorer – an iPhone app for serendipitous news discovery that was featured as ‘new and notablse’ in the US app store. He was featured in the MoMA exhibition Talk to Me in 2011.

Kars is principal designer at Hubbub, which he founded in 2009. Hubbub is a networked design studio that makes new games for social and organizational change. He is also an associate design researcher at the Creative Design for Playful Impact research group at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU).

Recently, Kars was co-curator of the Dutch edition of ‘This happened’, which he started in 2008. ‘This happened’ is a lecture series on the stories behind interaction design. He was also supervisor of students pursuing a Master of Arts in interaction design and game design at the HKU's graduate school.

Earlier, Kars worked as an interaction designer at several leading web agencies. He holds a Master of Arts in interaction design from the Utrecht School of the Arts. In his spare time, Kars is an aspiring yogi, studies Indonesian and tries to keep up with geek culture.

Dolf starts his career as successful comedian with Hans Sibbel (Lebbis) when they participate in the Leids Cabaret Festival in 1989. From then on, he performs as a duo in lots of sold out performances, also the famous Dutch New Year’s Eve show. In recent years, both comedians go their own way. Dolf performs with a series of one-man performances.

Dolf is creative. He writes, a lot and frequently: columns, poetry, lyrics, travel stories, interviews and also for several television programmes. He makes special performances for companies, conferences and he interviews sharp-tongued. He can also be heard in several radio programs. Dolf is also a committed person. He dedicates himself to Oxfam Novib and WarChild, the ‘HIER!’-campaign and the Dutch Cancer Foundation. Often much more tranquil than people expect from him, he always present with a touch of humor.

Dr. Todd B. Kashdan's broad mission is to increase the amount of well-being in this world as a professor, scientist, writer, and consultant. He uses cutting edge science to help people function optimally in business and life. 

He is Associate Professor of Psychology and Senior Scientist at the Center for Consciousness and Transformation at George Mason University. For nearly 15 years, he has been teaching college courses on the science of happiness and in 2010, received the Distinguished Faculty Member of the Year. To date, his clinical work and research has been on social relationships, anxiety, positive emotions, purpose in life, how personal strengths operate in everyday life, and how to foster and sustain happiness and meaning in life. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and authored Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life (William Morrow), Designing Positive Psychology (Oxford University Press), and Mindfulness, acceptance, and positive psychology: Principles and practices for cultivating well-being (New Harbinger).

Dr. Kashdan is a frequent radio, television, and print media contributor on how people and organizations can thrive, this includes feature articles in the New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post, regular appearances on National Public Radio, and blogs for The Huffington Post and Psychology Today. He's a twin and has twin 5-year old daughters, with plans to rapidly populate the world with great conversationalists.

Yuri Landman (1973) is an experimental instrument builder and musician. Based on prepared guitar techniques, he built his first instrument in 2001 to solve the inaccuracy of instant preparations. In 2012 Yuri formed the 2-piece band Bismuth with multi-instrumentalist Arnold van de Velde. In the same year he started his infamous Strat Eraser Project to help musicians get rid off their useless gear. 

In 2006 he got in contact with the band Liars. Developed over six years of prototyping, he fully realized the Moodswinger for them with commissions from numerous other musicians to follow. Yuri has custom built derivatives for such musical luminaries as Lou Barlow, Sonic Youth, dEUS, The Dodos and many more. Since 2009 Yuri leads practical building workshops – The Home Swinger Project - where people build their own electric instrument, often followed by an afternoon rehearsal on the second day and a 40 minute ensemble performance with multiple Home Swingers, drums, basses, and guitars in the tradition of the Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca compositions.

Reint Jan Renes – Applied professor cross media communication in the public domain
Reint Jan Renes is applied professor Cross media Communication in the Public Domain at the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht. and part-time associate professor Health Communication at Wageningen University. He studied social and organizational psychology at Utrecht University and conducted his PhD at the social psychology department of the Free University Amsterdam. In 2011 - among other things - he wrote together with the Dutch Ministry of General Affairs a research report about behavior change through mass media campaigns and developed with his research group a Campaign Strategy Instrument (CASI 2.0).

In 2005 Reint Jan was elected in Wageningen Teacher of the Year. His research concerns a variety of issues related to cross media communication, social psychology and behavior change. More specifically, he is interested in what triggers people to act, the conflict between people’s reflective and impulsive cognitive systems, and the intention-behavior gap. As such, he tries to isolate fundamental social psychological processes and tests their application to a variety of prosocial behaviors in the public domain.

Born in Afghanistan in 1983, Massoud Hassani moved to Holland in 1998 in search of a better life. Having adopted a new lifestyle and cultural habits, Hassani decided to pursue a creative education at the Design Academy Eindhoven. His creative talents had already emerged as a child in Kabul, where he would make all kinds of toys, sculptures and paintings.
Hassani’s 2009 research project focused on air, fire, earth and biomimicry, the result of which he turned into products. One such product is the Mine Sweeper, a landmine decommissioning device that takes its inspiration from a childhood toy. Mine Sweeper is a wind-blown, bamboo-spiked ball that loses spikes with each landmine detonation. A GPS built into the Mine Sweeper tracks the landmines back to a website to help track a safe course.
As a child in Afghanistan, where there are literally millions of landmines and the Mine Sweeper is Hassani’s solution to this problem. The project has won several prices and is nominated for the Design of the Year 2012 by the Design Museum in London.
Hassani’s latest project is a series of cooking products called “Silk Cooking”, inspired by Afghan traditions.

Stephen P. Anderson is an internationally recognized speaker and consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He created the Mental Notes card deck, a tool that's widely used by product teams to apply psychology to interaction design. He’s also of the author of the book Seductive Interaction Design, which answers the question: "How do we get people to fall in love with our applications?”

Prior to venturing out on his own, Stephen spent more than a decade building and leading teams of information architects, interaction designers and UI developers. He’s designed Web applications for numerous technology startups as well as corporate clients like Nokia, Frito-Lay, Sabre Travel Network, and Chesapeake Energy.

Between public speaking and project work, Stephen offers workshops and training to help organizations manage creative teams, make use of visual thinking, and design better customer experiences.

Rebecca Bortman is a designer for YouTube. She led design on YouTube's first major visual refresh project in the site's 7-year history. Before joining Google, Rebecca worked as a design consultant at Cooper and Mule Design, designing interfaces for everything from medical devices to online political publications and the info graphics for the interaction design bible, About Face 3.

Rebecca is the art director of The Disposable Film Festival, a festival celebrating the democratization of cinema made possible by low-cost video technology. She has spent the last five years fronting and song-writing for the indie pop band, My First Earthquake. She is one-half of the punk duo, Happy Fangs. She's collaborated with multiple electronic artists including The Amazing Rolo, and Mercury Rev's Anthony Molina and Amplive on an original song featured in Step Up 3D. She's a proud Pittsburgher and graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design. She's spoken at Toronto's NxNE interactive, Warm Gun Conference on Measurable Design, and SxSW's Next Stage and is pleased to be joining you in Utrecht.