Surya Vanka

Founder & Principal, Authentic Design

Seattle

Surya Vanka is a global leader in design, best known for his groundbreaking work in user experience at Microsoft, for creating industry leading design practices such Design Swarms Workshops & the Design Value Scorecard, as an influential author, and as a design educator in over 20 countries.

Surya led Microsoft’s center of design excellence for several years, and helped to drive the transformation of the company towards an agile, growth-hacking, experience-first culture. Prior to that, he was a tenured professor of design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study. Surya is the author of two books on design and has won several international design awards.

Surya’s work has been featured in: Form, I.D., Design Council, WIRED, Interactions, TEDx, BBC and NPR. He sits on the advisory board of Design Management Institute, is president-elect of Design in Public, and chair of the 50th anniversary of design international conference.

Surya lives in Seattle and leads AUTHENTIC, a design studio that specializes in design strategy, user experience, futures prototyping, service design and interaction design for clients worldwide with practices in both business and social innovation.