Moderated by
Manuela Procopio
Manuela Procopio is a designer, educator, and Academic Manager at IED Barcelona. Her work sits at the intersection of design practice, strategic education, and institutional change, shaping not just what is taught, but how design thinking becomes embedded in the people and organisations that encounter it.
With a background spanning service design, UX, and design strategy, she has worked across sectors and geographies, bringing the same instinct to every context: to zoom out to the full picture, and then zoom back in to where the real change can happen.
In 2015 she created one of the first professional service design courses in Spain, at a time when few institutions in the country knew what to do with the discipline. She has continued building on that foundation, while observing with honesty how the field has evolved, what it has gained, and what it has quietly let go.
Panellists
Sarah Auslander
A service designer, user researcher, and educator with over 15 years of experience helping organizations understand people, design better services, and drive meaningful change. Sarah currently works in the Research team at Payoneer, where she leads strategic user research that helps shape product strategy, customer experience, and business decisions across global financial services.
Before moving into fintech, Sarah led service design and innovation initiatives in Israel’s public sector, partnering with government ministries, municipalities, healthcare organizations, and civic organizations to improve services for citizens. This experience continues to shape her belief that the best services balance human needs, operational realities, and measurable outcomes.
Alongside her industry work, Sarah teaches Service Design in the Master’s Program at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, where she mentors the next generation of designers in applying human-centered design to complex societal challenges.
Alexia Molina
Alexia Molina founded and leads Impact Studio at Sopra Steria Next, a team that helps organisations decide what to build, and then builds it, with AI embedded from day one.
Her career mirrors how the designer’s job has stretched. She started in strategic planning at McCann, then brought Design Thinking and Agile into technology delivery at Accenture. At Fjord she led service and business design for Iryo, Spain’s first private high-speed rail operator, from incubator to launch. At IKEA she led Stores of Tomorrow globally, redesigning 12 of 13 core journey components in a flagship store.
Each step moved design closer to where decisions are made. With AI making prototypes cheap, she believes the scarce skill is no longer making things but judgement: deciding what deserves to exist, and staying accountable once it meets real people. She studied Fine Arts at Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Júlia Fort
Júlia Fort is a designer and researcher who uses design as a lever for organisational change. Currently leading Growth Design and User Research at Manychat, she brings an ethnographic eye to everyday product work, getting close to how people actually live, work and decide, and making sure those insights shape what a company builds and why.
For Júlia, product design, service design and research aren’t separate crafts but complementary tools. She uses service design frameworks to make complex systems visible, turning messy business decisions into maps and stories that teams can see, question and act on together. Just as important is how change happens: she brings people along, creating shared understanding across design, product, data and leadership rather than handing over deliverables.
With an MSc in Strategic Design and experience across industries, most recently in SaaS, she has helped teams move from intuition to evidence and from silos to shared direction.
Inés Peláez
Inés is a former Service Design Manager at Zurich Insurance and currently a Principal Design Strategist at New Relic. She helps organizations transform fragmented design, product, and AI efforts into coherent, high-value experience strategies.