Heidi Smith is a partner at Gray Puksand with almost 30 years of experience designing award winning workspaces. Passionate about Australian architecture and design, Heidi is a workspace strategy expert leading the way with new methods and advancements in workspace design, culture, and management styles. Heidi’s strength lies in fostering positive culture change through comprehensive workspace design. She finds adopting a ‘people matter’ design approach is necessary in delivering actual workplace change.

Heidi is also director at TEN Women, a company led by women in the property and construction industry with a mandate to connect and empower women to create a meaningful impact in the property industry

Cliff Ho is co-founder of The Commons, an eco-system of entrepreneurs, businesses & curious minds working, connecting, and growing under a common roof. The Commons mission is to provide an environment that allows businesses to connect and grow, achieved through continuous research and mindful consideration of every aspect within their spaces.

Sustainably focused, The Commons was the 2017 Gold Winner of the Melbourne Design Awards thanks to its glowing 100% renewable energy credentials and insightful design. Cliff Ho has created co-working spaces with the ability to cater to people’s various moods and needs, providing members easy options to make sustainable decisions in their daily lives, designed with meticulous attention to detail and the belief that good design is essential to improving the work-life integration of members.

Duncan Harper is the National Design and Construction manager at Medibank and has extensive experience and success working in a variety of different sectors, including architecture, interior design, industrial design, procurement, and supply chain management.

In his role at Medibank, Duncan leads and manages the team to deliver all Medibank property related capital projects across their 85 store retail network and portfolio offices and buildings. Duncan has taken on leadership roles delivering projects across retail, food and beverage, residential property, and commercial offices. This experience and expertise enables him to develop and mentor people with diverse skills, backgrounds, and personal attributes, into an efficient, supportive, high-functioning team.

Professor Lisa Grocott is director of Wonderlab, a diverse interdisciplinary learning community within the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University and the home for design and ethnography PhD candidates. Equal parts researcher, designer, and educator, Lisa has had decades of leadership experience including roles as the Dean of Academic Initiatives at Parsons in New York, Head of Design at Monash, and Post-graduate Research Director at RMIT in Melbourne. Lisa’s translational research is regularly published and has been awarded more than $2.5 million in funding. She is currently working on a book on Design for Transformative Learning for Routledge’s Design for Social Responsibility series.

Passionate about designing for transformative encounters that shift how we show up and act in the world, Lisa’s values and beliefs about transformative, embodied knowing, doing and being are most directly informed from the holistic Indigenous lessons her Māori kaumatua (elders) taught her as a young Ngāti Kahungunu woman.