The Forum
Friday, April 11, 2025
Friday, April 11, 2025
The Forum is a day-long conference featuring national and international design leaders, examining a cross section of design practices. We’ll discuss everything from motion graphics to editorial design.
The conference’s special format allows for in-depth conversation and audience interaction. Themed talks followed by small, intimate panels give everyone the chance to dig into each topic.
Professor at SADI
Seohyo practices a form of installation and performance-based work. She combines common everyday objects with media technology, rendering them unfamiliar and allowing us to perceive ordinary things in new ways. Recently, she has expanded her daily coding practice to generative art, which she started as a way to encourage herself during the pandemic.
She creates a variety of animations, either mathematically imagined shapes or taking inspiration from nature. These works have also been featured on urban billboards at the Korea National Museum of History (Seoul), Kerry Center (Hangzhou), Ten Square (Singapore), Hoog Catharijne (Utrecht), Shibuya Scramble Crossing(Tokyo) and Incheon International Airport. She also has taken part in events such as BLINK(2024), SIGNAL(2024), Demo Festival(2022), D:Art Festival(2022), the Asia Triennial Manchester(2011), the Seoul Mediacity Biennale(2008), the Gwangju Design Biennale(2007), the Kobe Biennale(2007), the Ogaki Biennale(2006), and SIGGRAPH(2006).
See her work
Director, SAW.EARTH
Drew Seskunas is a designer, architect and director of SAW.EARTH, whose work focuses on highlighting the essential elements and systems that combine to give our world meaning. Spanning diverse scales of the built environment, his clients vary from public commissions for the NYC Parks Department, products for Design Within Reach as well as a yearly design/build student workshop constructing a permanent pavilion for community gardens throughout New York City.
See his work
Cofounder, Icarus Medical
Evan received degrees in Bioengineering and Finance from Lehigh University's IBE program with a strong focus on customer-centric design, biomechanics and innovation. Evan's previous experience was in the design of proteins, cells, and biomanufacturing systems as a cofounder and COO of Lytos Technologies. He has since pivoted into the orthopedic device space as cofounder and COO at Icarus Medical Innovations. The team at Icarus has developed a new class of assistive orthopedic braces with industry-leading patient outcomes for arthritis and other mobility limitations. Icarus has paired 3D scanning software, CAD, design automation, and industrial 3D printing to rapidly prototype, test and launch a portfolio of products across multiple bracing categories. Icarus puts the patient at the center of their design process, yielding outcome-driven innovations that get their patients back to doing what they love.
See his work
Freelance animator for Google, Warby Parker, The New York Times, etc.
Jordan Bruner is an award-winning creative director, designer, and illustrator, recognized by an Emmy nomination and the Art Directors Club Young Guns Award. Her films have screened at festivals like Pictoplasma and the LA Film Festival, and her illustrations have been honored by the Society of Illustrators and American Illustration. She has collaborated with clients such as Warby Parker, The New York Times, BUCK, and Google, with work showcased at CADAF Miami, NYC’s MTA Arts and Design program, her 2023 solo painting exhibition, and the 2024 Made in Virginia Biennial. A teacher at Virginia Commonwealth University, she also mentors MFA students at the School of Visual Arts and co-founded the Richmond Animation Festival in 2023.
See her work
Founder, Masd LAB
Marcos Silva is a London-based Senior Motion Designer with over a decade of experience crafting high-end motion graphics, animation, and design. His work spans major agencies and brands, including Adam&Eve, AMV BBDO, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Saatchi & Saatchi, and TBWA, among others. With a background in both branding and motion, Marcos has collaborated with some of the world’s leading creative studios, bringing bold storytelling and technical precision to every project. Beyond client work, Marcos runs a motion design YouTube channel, where he shares insights, techniques, and creative experiments with a global audience. His passion for education and design innovation drives him to explore the intersection of motion, automation, and generative design, making complex workflows more intuitive and efficient.
See his work
Design Brouhaha
Loïc Marleix is a French independent designer specializing in systems architecture, interfaces, semiotics, and writing systems. He has worked for fifteen years for a wide range of industries, from idea to product launch, helping companies with digitization strategies, UX/UI design, and development. Under the name Design Brouhaha, Loïc continues studying the frontiers of means of communication through Unicode exploration, pasigraphy, text-based visual art, and internet subculture. Since 2021, he has been working actively on preserving the pictorial language constructed by Japanese designer Yukio Ota, known under the name "Lovers Communication System." Invented sixty years ago, LoCos aimed to provide a solution where meaning, shape, and sound would work together, a language where people could perceive the meaning of a sentence at a glance. While praised by the design community at the time, the full potential of LoCoS is yet to be realized. For this purpose, Loïc has built a free and accessible web platform and other tools to offer a new audience an opportunity to learn, play, and write with LoCoS. In his presentation, he will show the language Ota imagined, his digitization work, and the result of his experimentation, reevaluating the potential of this unique view of the world.
See his work
Head of UX Writing, Figma
Sophie Tahran is the Head of UX Writing at Figma, where she’s working on making design accessible for everyone. In past lives, she founded UX writing practices at The New Yorker, Condé Nast, and InVision, and wore many hats in the early days of Lyft. She currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband and dog.
See her work
225 W Water St
The Irving Theater is a 200 seat, state-of-the-art event space located in the CODE building. The theater is equipped with a 16’ x 9’ backlit LED display, phenomenal for viewing design work.
