Ambassadors

Jean-Pierre Biasol

Founder, Biasol Design Studio

Jean-Pierre Biasol is described as a natural to the language of design. Founding multi-award winning Biasol Design Studio in 2012, the studio works locally and internationally across interiors, buildings, products and branded environments. Driven by detail and quality, the studio works without divisions in a holistic and integrated mission for form and function.

Hana Hakim

Founder, The Stella Collective

British-born Hana Hakim is an award-winning interior designer and the founder of The Stella Collective.

Sharpening her eye since childhood, her ability to infuse light and space into her work has led to commissions locally and internationally from elegant workspaces that embody wellbeing to Australia’s most prolific and iconic restaurants.

Framing these spaces and volumes with extreme precision her design is known to have a timeless quality that touches the human core.

“My philosophy is to create goodness in this world. Our environment, no matter where, whether it be a rocking hotel, hospitality venue, a workplace that embodies wellbeing or even a small village in the middle east, we create spaces that make people feel good. We design for love, truth, and fearlessness.”

Richard Healy

Associate, Bates Smart

Richard Healy is continually inspired by the capacity of good design to positively improve the daily experience. He has an extensive range of project and sector experience, but is particularly passionate about workplace design and the transformative potential to impact the day-to-day working experience.

Richard has strong collaborative and team leadership skills and relishes the opportunity to form long-lasting relationships with clients. He particularly enjoys translating client aspirations and working with the team to successfully deliver a project.

Since joining Bates Smart, Richard has worked on a number of significant workplace projects including Australian Unity, BCG, Australian Super, Australian Embassy in Washington DC, and the 101 Collins Street Masterplan, alongside some significant hospitality projects including Westin Hotel Darwin and Bourke Street Green.

Donn Salisbury

Director, Electrolight

Donn is Director of Electrolight, an independent lighting design studio with offices in Sydney, Melbourne and San Francisco. Electrolight stands as an industry leader on an international stage, recently awarded the 2019 International Lighting Design Practice of the Year at the LDA awards in London.

Donn’s 20+ years experience in lighting design exhibits a combination of creativity, innovation and accolades. With a background in visual arts, creative design and engineering, coupled with a passion for lighting and the visual realm, Donn’s insight and leadership drives his team of talented designers toward modernism of illumination design in the built environment and the world of light art.

This approach has gained the respect of his peers, affirmed by the receipt of multiple awards including 17x International Lighting Design Awards and 22x National and State Lighting Design Awards. Donn’s experience and reach across the design industry is widespread, with involvement in the design of more than a thousand projects over the past 20 years.

Donn is a member of the IALD and IES, and has a long past and ongoing role in the lighting community, currently seated as the NSW Coordinator for the IALD, as well as past roles in the IES, Objective:Light, Property Council of Australia and the GBCA.

Alice Nadja Sehovic

Senior Interior Designer, Architects EAT

Alice Nadja is passionate about the design industry and the opportunities it presents to meet different people, and to create. An interior design graduate with Honours from RMIT, Alice is currently studying to become an architect.

Alice has always taken a holistic approach to design with architecture and interiors considered as one. Alice says, “I’m always thinking with an inside-out approach and I’ve been lucky enough to work with people who share the same values and have provided me with the opportunity to deliver projects across all stage.”

In her role at Architects EAT, Alice works all disciplines, but a large part of her experience lies in high-end residential design. It’s in this typology that her love for composition, materiality, lighting, custom furniture and joinery is pushed further. Going from the big picture to the details is also something that Alice is unafraid to get stuck into. “I love shifting scales, so working on a big build whilst simultaneously thinking about sofa legs and details,” she says.

A social and curious person, Alice is always keeping her eyes open and being an ambassador at Saturday Indesign is the perfect opportunity to be part of a wider conversation with the community.

Beck Trenorden

Associate, Hassell

Beck is an associate at Hassell, specialising in workplace design for 15 years.  She has worked across Australia, China and Hong Kong, and now resides back in Melbourne.

Beck’s strengths are in design concept and process, “the big idea”, design leading various scale projects and installations, including the award-winning Arup Melbourne.

She approaches design with a holistic, multi-disciplinary view challenging the norm, encouraging sustainability and wellbeing and being passionate about creating places that people love.

Tristan Wong

Director of Architecture, SJB

An awarded architect and SJB Director, Tristan’s innovative thinking and bold solutions are intrinsically connected to positive wellbeing outcomes and environmental benefits. His projects have won architectural and urban design awards, with particular reference to their clarity of message, innovation in their planning and design, and capacity to improve the health and experience of users.

His dedication to a more humanity-based outcome and belief in architecture’s ability to make a positive change to society at large is explored (both in practice, research and publication) of social and affordable housing systems, as well as progressive models of workplace design.

Tristan has experience in the curation, design and delivery of exhibitions and installations, in the fields of both art and architecture – both here and abroad. He has also guest lectured at universities, illustrated for a book on environmental design, and advocates and supports not-for-profits including Architects Without Frontiers, Career Trackers and Career Seekers.

A former life as an illustrator and fine artist – and significantly, both parents artists – has coloured his perspective on architecture, and design more broadly. This has played out in an approach to processes within the studio that encourages hand drawing and sketching – a reminder of the inextricable connection between human-made design processes and the built environment.