Meet the Minds Behind Our Curriculum

A Designlab course is only as good as the people who created it. Our courses are built and taught by working designers, educators, and specialists who care deeply about the field, and who shape everything from how the curriculum is sequenced to how concepts get explained in a lecture or written lesson. In many courses, students get to meet them directly through live lectures; in others, their fingerprints are in the materials students work through every week.

These are the instructors and course creators — a group distinct from our mentors, who lead one-on-one sessions and peer groups (you can learn more about them here). We wanted to introduce a few of them.

Chrissy Welsh 

VP Experience, KPN | Mentor, Course Creator for AI for UX Design

Chrissy Welsh, VP Experience at KPN, has been part of the Designlab community for years — first as a longtime mentor in UX Academy, and now as the course creator and instructor of AI for UX Design. You'll feel her energy within a few minutes of meeting her. She brings a vibrant personality, deep curiosity, and a warmth that students consistently single out.

Chrissy has been working with AI inside large companies — from Philips to ING and Backbase — long before it was commonplace. But what students appreciate just as much as her expertise is her perspective: she doesn't fearmonger about AI, and she doesn't oversell it either. She approaches it as a designer trying to do good work, and that grounded optimism makes a course on a topic that can otherwise feel overwhelming, feel encouraging.

What Chrissy wants designers to take away is permission to push past their own assumptions. "People put their own limitations on what is possible." Her course is designed to widen the aperture and give designers a repeatable framework for evaluating whatever technologies come next.

Chris Risdon 

Designer Ex-eBay, IBM, Capital One | Creator and Instructor, Designing AI Products

We knew there was a gap in our course catalog: a course not on using AI for design, but on designing AI products and features themselves. So we started looking for an instructor, and when Chris's application came in, our team’s reaction was immediate: this is the gu

Chris's path is less a straight line than a zigzag: mid-nineties web and product management, then a detour back to school for an MFA in graphic design, editorial design work in New York, and finally a return to UX with a focus on interaction design. From there, a decade-plus across Microsoft, IBM, eBay, and the influential consultancy Adaptive Path. For the last five years, he's been working on AI specifically: building agents inside IBM's Watson group (including one for fast-food drive-thrus, which gave him a service-design education in human-and-agent handoffs), designing AI-powered clinical workflows at Viz AI, and serving as eBay's first designer dedicated exclusively to AI.

That graphic-design detour matters more than it might sound. Chris draws on it constantly when he teaches. His pedagogy comes from a graphic design observation: the designers who really grokked typography or Gestalt principles — closure, negative space — always had a leg up, even when they wanted to break the rules. He wants designers to leave his course with the same combination for AI: the practical patterns and enough theory to know when AI actually belongs in a product and when it doesn't. His shorthand for the latter is "matchmaking" — figuring out where the technology genuinely meets a user need versus where it's being slapped on to compensate for a broken experience. As he puts it: "A lot of people have the gun. They don't know how to aim it. They don't know how to do target practice."

Chadwick Smith 

Senior Learning Experience Designer

Chadwick Smith serves as an in-house learning design partner for our subject-matter experts. He works alongside the instructors who create our courses, helping them shape and revise curriculum, sequence lessons, frame the material, and translate practical expertise into something that actually teaches. He also moderates many of our live sessions and runs B2B trainings for companies that want to upskill in AI.

Chadwick spent the first part of his career in academia: a PhD in German language and literature and 12 years as a professor before he made the jump. His way of describing why he left is characteristically dry: "I wanted to change lanes, but there aren't any other lanes in academia." He missed the classroom, the teaching, the curriculum design — he just didn't miss the rest of it. "I like the work. I didn't like the job." He moved into edtech in late 2019, eventually becoming Head of Instructional Design at the edtech startup Yellowbrick before joining Designlab.

His philosophy comes from years of watching college professors, good and bad. "Every college professor is ideally a subject matter expert and a learning designer. The bad ones are usually just subject matter experts who have no idea how to convey what they're trying to say." Most online courses, in his view, get one of those right and not the other. That's the gap his role exists to close. And he's clear about why he stays hands-on in the classroom as a moderator: "The further you get from interacting with students, the worse you get at designing courses."

In live sessions, he describes his approach as "moderating a panel" — the instructor gives the paper, and he keeps his finger on the pulse of the audience in the chat. Students who've been in live sessions with Chadwick often single out the value of his presence — the extra context, the well-timed nudges that push them to think a layer deeper, and the sense that someone in the room is reading the class as it unfolds.

Nevan Scott

Course Creator and Instructor, Advanced Figma, Prototyping in Figma, Advanced Design Craft

Nevan Scott is a real nerd for computing: how it works, where it came from, and how designers should engage with it. When Nevan was a preteen, a friend first showed him how to write HTML in Notepad and open the file in a browser — and from that moment, he was hooked on the idea that publishing on the internet was “a kind of superpower.” 

Nevan worked as a full-stack designer-developer before they became separate disciplines. After agency work in Los Angeles and New York, and designing systems for the Swiss Red Cross, Northeastern University, Rustic Pathways, and Buzzfeed, Nevan moved into teaching and co-founded the Button School, a platform offering specialized courses for working designers.

For Nevan, teaching is a passion. He has led programs at General Assembly and Ironhack, and coached designers and developers at every stage of their careers. At Designlab, Nevan is the co-creator of Advanced Figma, Prototyping in Figma, and, most recently, Advanced Design Craft. 

Nevan’s approach is built around a conviction that designers should know their medium intimately, from pixel-level craft up. He has been thinking about the foundations and evolution of the craft for decades — and he lights up when he gets to share what he knows. "When what you do is make things to be usable by other humans, the way to be more concrete in your work is to get a little into the weeds of: okay, but how does this thing actually work?"