Meet the team behind ThingsCon:

Iskander Smit

Iskander Smit (@iskandr) is chairman of the foundation ThingsCon Amsterdam. He is founder at Target is New. Before he was innovation director at agency INFO in Amsterdam, responsible for research and development and leading LABS and design director at Structural.

Next to that, Iskander was a visiting professor and lab director at Delft University of Technology faculty of Industrial Design researching Cities of Things, now an independent research platform foundation.
Since 2010, Iskander is a member of the Council Internet of Things and co-founded the Behavior Design AMS meetup.

Lorna Goulden

Lorna Goulden (@lornagoulden) works as a Digital Experience Principal and is also a Venture Advisor at LumoLabs and co-founder of the Twinds Foundation – an SSI and Disposable Identities non-profit. She also initiated the Eindhoven IoT Meetup and the Eindhoven ThingsNetwork and more recently joined the board of ThingsCon. Her passion is to navigate between the different cultures of Design, Technology and Business. Building bridges whilst advocating more sustainable value creation that is driven by more meaningful user experiences. Together with ThingsCon she ran the workshop series the Trust Toolkit – with a vision to identify the tools needed to rebuild our trust in technology and data driven business. 

Pieter Diepenmaat

Pieter Diepenmaat (@__pieter__) is board member of ThingsCon and runs DIEP, an invention studio for smart, well-behaved products. Combining design, research and prototyping they help companies create and validate new IoT solutions, specialising in mobility and industry. His clients include Pfizer, SKF, NS, Ford and Roetz Bikes.

Besides organising Thingscon events and inventing products, Pieter also plays joysticks in the band WLDRF.

Andrea Krajewski

Prof Andrea Krajewski (@krajewski) is an industrial designer, speaker and blogger. Since 25 years she is fascinated by the changing role of design in innovation processes. In 1994 she co-founded 360° – a design agency with an interdisciplinary approach, designing products at the border of digital and analogue media. In 2002 she was appointed as a professor for the Design of Interactive Media Systems at the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt. Here she established the interdisciplinary study course Interactive Media Design the UX-Lab and the THINGS-Lab – the current centres of her research. The contact to the ThingsCon-Team for her was like love at first sight.

She is a founding member of ThingsCon e.V. and hosts the ThingsCon Salon Darmstadt

Earlier team members

Peter Bihr

Peter Bihr (@peterbihr) co-founded ThingsCon e.V.. Peter is the founder and Managing Director of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight company. He explores how emerging technologies can have a positive social impact. Peter is a Mozilla Fellow (2018-19) and Edgeryders Fellow (2019), and Postscapes named him a Top 20 Influencer in IoT (2019). He is the author of View Source: Shenzhen and Understanding the Connected Home (with Michelle Thorne). He blogs at thewavingcat.com/blog.

Simon Höher

Simon Höher (@jimmiehu) is co-founder of ThingsCon and CURRENT, a multi-disciplinary research studio. As a strategy and innovation consultant he works with DAX30 companies, start ups, public organizations and cities across various industries around the globe, drawing on concepts of lean product and service design, and human-centered innovation for resilient digital transformation.

Earlier he co-founded .process, a conference about the patterns of emerging innovation in art, tech, and business and headed his own Start Up for five years, launching two digital products around innovation, hardware, and local collaboration. Simon’s academic background is in politics, economics, and philosophy and his work and projects have been featured in national and international media like WIRED, Fast.co, Make: Magazine, BILD, PAGE, Deutschland Radio, and others.