Surya Vanka is a transdisciplinary designer whose work spans physical and digital experience, corporate innovation, civic life, and the academy. He is the founder of Authentic Design and serves as President of the Board of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) for 2025–26. Vanka was Director of User Experience at Microsoft, supporting a global design community of more than 1,000 designers, and prior to that a tenured professor of industrial design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study. He invented Design Swarms — an agile design methodology now deployed worldwide to tackle challenges from homelessness to disaster relief. He has served on international juries including the Singapore Design Mark and the India Design Excellence Awards. Vanka’s career has been defined by a single conviction: that design, at its most authentic, is an act of empowerment.