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Serena Westra is a Senior Service Designer at Koos Service Design, a Dutch service design agency. Specialising in service design, she has nearly 10 years of experience in storytelling, strategic innovation, and facilitation. By collaboration with companies like ING Bank, Philips, and Cisco, she has built her career path towards being this year's Service Design Network finalist for her work about inclusive design with the municipality of Amsterdam.

For the past year, Serena has been part of OLX group’s AI-by-design innovation team. She performs a leading role in the squared initiative, where she is responsible for designing a new way of working that combines machine learning, service design, and experiment design.

Serena's passion for visual thinking, improvisation theater, and storytelling are some of her greatest assets. She applies them daily - from persuading stakeholders and giving powerful pitches to successfully training and coaching over 500 professionals in service design. Furthermore, in 2019, together with the health care organisation Cordaan, Serena had an award-winning project that focused on making health care more inclusive by combining Service Design with animation.

Serena holds a BA in Media & Culture Studies and a MA in New Media & Digital Culture from the University of Amsterdam. Before joining Koos, she worked in visual consultancy, and as a lecturer at several universities, like TU Delft and Willem de Kooning Art Academy. Currently, she is running a successful side-business as podcast studio founder
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Event role
Speaker

Case talk
'AI-by-design approach for radical innovation'

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are playing an increasingly important role in shaping the future of our everyday lives. But how does one design solutions with AI and ML at its core? What comes first, desirability (do customers want this) or feasibility (can we build this)? This is just one of the questions the Squared Initiative team of OLX had to deal with over the past 1.5 years.

The team's mission is to stay ahead of the competition by designing future proof solutions with AI-by-design. They designed a new way of working to achieve that mission that combines service design and data science that radically innovates the 100-year-old company. In this talk, Heitor Pagliari will share his experience working in an AI team. Together with Serena Westra, he will highlight how a client-consultancy collaboration is fundamental to successfully kickstart such an AI-by-design initiative. Together they will unravel the magic of designing with AI and show you it's less daunting than you might think.

Scheduled
Saturday, September 18, 11:30

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