Princess Dana Firas
Princess Dana Firas is the wife of Prince Firas bin Raad. She is currently president of the Petra National Trust, a Jordanian nongovernmental and not-for-profit organization dedicated to the preservation, protection and conservation of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Petra.
In 2017, Princess Dana was designated as a UNESCO goodwill ambassador in recognition of her outstanding commitment to the protection and preservation of heritage for sustainable development.
Princess Dana has won the Arab Heritage Person Award for 2018 as well. She is the first woman and first Jordanian to be selected.
Princess Dana holds a bachelor of arts in economics and international relations from Boston University, a master of science in development studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a master of public administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government focused on sustainable development and environmental policy, where she was a Fulbright Scholar.
Peter Zec
Peter Zec is the founder and CEO of Red Dot.
In 1991, he took over at the helm of Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in Essen, Germany, which has hosted a design competition since 1955. Zec further developed what had until then been a national competition, transforming it into an international platform for the evaluation of design. He established its global gearing and expanded the Red Dot brand.
In 2006, German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche selected him as one of the “20 creative lateral thinkers who changed the face of their companies or created entirely new markets,” while Marketing Club Ruhr awarded him the title of “Head of the Year” in 2016. In the same year, he was awarded honorary citizenship of the city of Seoul for his work on behalf of the South Korean capital.
Before joining Design Zentrum, Zec was head of the visual department at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, worked as managing director of Bund Deutscher Grafik-Designer and the Association of German Industrial Designers. In 1993 he accepted a professorship in business communication management at the HTW Berlin - University of Applied Sciences, where he taught for 17 years.
After more than 25 years as the head of Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen, Zec is more actively integrated than ever in the world of design -- as managing partner, author and editor as well as the host of the Red Dot Gala. In addition, he is a sought-after adviser and speaker on all of the world’s continents -- one who consistently emphasizes, recognizes and respects the value of good design.
Martino Gamper
Martino Gamper is a London-based Italian designer. Starting as an apprentice with a furniture maker in Merano in northern Italy, Gamper went on to study sculpture under Michelangelo Pistoletto at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. He completed a masters in 2000 from the Royal College of Art, London, where he studied under Ron Arad.
Working across design and art venues, Gamper engages in a variety of projects from exhibition design, interior design, one-off commissions and the design of mass-produced products for the cutting edge of the international furniture industry.
Gamper started to build his reputation through his solo exhibition “Confronting the Chair,” at the Design Museum in London and gained international recognition through his landmark show “100 Chairs in 100 Days” in 2007, where he reconfigured 100 abandoned chairs he had rescued over a two-year period.
Gamper was the recipient of the Moroso Award for Contemporary Art in 2011 and the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year, Furniture Award in 2008 for his project “100 Chairs in 100 Days.”
Thomas Heatherwick
Thomas Heatherwick is a British designer whose prolific and varied work over two decades is characterized by its ingenuity, inventiveness and originality.
Defying the conventional classification of design disciplines, Thomas founded Heatherwick Studio in 1994 to bring the practices of design, architecture and urban planning together in a single workspace.
Thomas leads the design of all Heatherwick Studio projects, working in collaboration with a team of 180 highly skilled architects, designers and makers. Thomas’ unusual approach applies artistic thinking to the needs of each project, resulting in some of the most acclaimed designs of our time. Based in London, Heatherwick Studio is currently working on four continents on projects valued at over 2 billion pounds ($2.56 billion). Following the Gold Award success of the UK Pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo in 2010, Heatherwick Studio has gone on to win design briefs including for the Google campus in Silicon Valley, Coal Drops Yard in Kings Cross, London and an overhaul of London Olympia.
The studio has recently completed the 420,000-square-meter Bund Finance Centre in Shanghai, a collaboration with Foster + Partners, and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, the first museum of its kind on the continent.
Thomas has been appointed as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Royal Academician and in 2004 became the youngest Royal Designer for Industry.
Junya Ishigami
Rising Japanese architect Junya Ishigami was born in Kanagawa in 1974.
Ishigami worked with Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Kazuyo Sejima between 2000 and 2004 before starting his own architecture firm, junya.ishigami+associates, in 2004.
Ishigami presented solo in the Japanese pavilion at the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2008. In 2009, he became the youngest-ever recipient of the Architectural Institute of Japan Prize for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology KAIT Workshop. In 2010, Ishigami also won the Golden Lion for best project at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale. That same year he became an associate professor at Tohoku University in Japan.
In 2014 he was made the Kenzo Tange Design Critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Ishigami is the winner of the fifth BSI Swiss Architectural Award 2016. Recently, Ishigami held a solo at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, under the title of “Freeing Architecture.” Ishigami has published architectural works “How Small? How Vast,” “How Architecture Grows” and “Freeing Architecture.”
Deyan Sudjic
Having become director of the Design Museum in London in 2006, Deyan Sudjic’s career spans many different areas, including journalism, education and writing.
Sudjic was director of Glasgow UK City of Architecture in 1999 and curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002.
He served as editor of Domus magazine from 2000 to 2004 and was founding editor of Blueprint magazine from 1983 to 1996. Sudjic has published many books on design and architecture. Included in his publications are 2006’s “The Edifice Complex,” 2008’s “The Language of Things,” “Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture” published in 2010, “Shiro Kuramata” published in 2013, “B is for Bauhaus” published in 2014 and “Ettore Sottsass, the Poetry of Things” published in 2015. His most recent book, “The Language of Cities,” was published by Penguin in October 2016.
Sudjic was made an Order of the British Empire in 2000.
Yoo Hyun-joon
Yoo Hyun-joon is perhaps one of the architects most widely known to the public here. Yoo started to gain a public reputation after publications and particularly after making appearances on a local TV program.
A professor at Hongik University School of Architecture since 2005, Yoo also runs Hyunjoon Yoo Architects, which he founded in 2007.
Yoo is known for a minimalistic approach to architecture, partly influenced by his experience at Richard Meier & Partners Architects, New York between 2003 and 2005.
Yoo has won numerous architecture awards here and abroad, including the Korean Architecture Award in 2015 and Kim Swoo Geun Prize Preview Award in 2013, among others.
“Floating House” was listed among CNN Travel’s list of “Seoul’s architectural wonders,” a selection of 15 notable buildings in the capital.
Yoo earned a bachelor of science in architecture at Yonsei University in Seoul and master’s degrees at Harvard University and MIT.