Dr Nick de León is designer, entrepreneur and academic, an expert in the design of customer experience and service Innovation and founded the Service Design Masters and PhD programme at the RCA; the largest of its kind worldwide. He is also Professor of Systems Design at Liverpool Hope University and a Teaching Fellow at London Business School. His research explores the interface between the design discipline, digital technology and business innovation and specifically the role of service design as an agent of change in the development of public policy, business strategy and organisational transformation. He is also the academic lead for the Terra Carta Design Lab, an initiative created by Sir Jony Ive with HM King Charles III which uses the power of design to create solutions that address climate change and biodiversity, in harmony people, planet and nature.
He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Art, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the Royal Commission for the 1851 Exhibition and a Director and Trustee of the UN sponsored alliance - Design For Good, a collaboration of 12 Global Corporations that engages hundreds of designers worldwide to develop breakthrough solutions that address the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Prior to joining Academia he had a corporate career in Design, Product Development and Business with IBM, beginning his career as an Industrial Designer at IBM's R&D Labs in the UK before working in the European and Global Headquarters of the company in a variety of senior executive roles including Director of Marketing, IBM Europe, Middle East and Africa.
Dr Nicolás Rebolledo is a strategic service designer and educator based in London. He is a Senior Tutor in Service Design and Design Futures (Associate Professor) at the Royal College of Art, where he leads the Service Futures Studio and co-directs Wicked Acceleration Labs, a joint research partnership between the RCA and Imperial College Business School. He is co-founder of UNIT, an innovation and strategic service design consultancy, Fellow of States of Change and has been Design Advisor at the MIT GovLab. An architect from the Catholic University of Chile, he holds an MSc in Technology Entrepreneurship from the University College London (UCL) and a PhD in Service Design from the Royal College of Art.