TEDxOCADU 2026: Unleashing Innovation with Impact: Leveraging Empathy, Creativity, and Foresight
A day of ideas, perspectives, and conversations that stay with you
TEDxOCADU 2026 is a space for ideas that are still unfolding, questions that don’t have easy answers, and work that sits at the intersection of disciplines and lived experience.
Can’t attend in person? All of the talks will be live streamed on YouTube. Click the button below to join online.
Centered around the theme “Unleashing Innovation with Impact: Leveraging Empathy, Creativity, and Foresight,” the event explores what it really takes to create change in complex and uncertain contexts. Empathy asks us to look more closely at lived experiences and unmet needs. Creativity pushes us to challenge assumptions and imagine alternatives. Foresight encourages us to think beyond the present and consider the long-term implications of our choices.
Through this lens, students, alumni, and professionals from the wider community will share how their work moves from insight to action. Whether addressing social systems, health, identity, technology, or the environment, the talks highlight how these ways of thinking come together to shape more thoughtful and impactful approaches to the future.
Join us on May 28, 2026, from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM at 130 Queens Quay E, Floor 4R, Toronto for a full day of thoughtful talks and meaningful exchange.
Come curious. Leave with something to think about.
Event Details and Registration
Tickets are free, and formal registration is required. Please register on this Eventbrite page to reserve your spot. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. We recommend arriving early to secure your preferred seat.
Schedule
10:00 am - Welcome
10:15 am - The Future of Circular Consumption: What My Kids’ Clutter Taught Me About Building Better Systems, Aisling Nolan
10:40 am: - Soo Dhawaawda Come Closer: Reimagining Stories Through Somali Storytelling, Aliya Ahmed-Mohamoud
11:00 am - Access Isn’t Inclusion: The Agency Gap for Middle Aged Immigrant Women, Markhan Hussain and Marolin Solano
11:15 am - The Future of Coffee, Valeria Suing
11:30 am - “When Culture Becomes a Strength” Acknowledging Different Cultural Ways of Thinking, Aradhana Verma
11:45 am - 1,000,000 rules for building a perfect city, Jeff Ranson
12:00 - 1:00 pm - Break for lunch & Project viewing
1:10 pm - Designed to Love You: How AI is Replacing Love, Ann de Sequeira and Meg Lin
1:30 pm - The Cost of Being Seen, Dania Idam
1:45 pm - The Future of Home: Reimagining Belonging in an Uncertain World, Luke Correia-Damude and Janine Pierre
2:00 pm - The problems AI can’t solve, Roxanne Nicolussi
2:20 pm - Reimagining the Runway: Who Gets to Design the Future?, Delina yohannes
2:35 pm - Practising Inclusive Design in Partnerships with Disability Communities, Angelique Saunders
2:50 pm - Seeding transformation: how we learn to imagine and hope together again, Sara Blanke and Malu Cascelli
3:10 pm - Lessons from 7 Years and 250+ Design Critiques, Everton Lewis
3:25 pm - Final remarks
Speakers
Delina yohannes
Delina Yohannes is a designer, model and researcher working at the intersection of inclusive design, fashion systems, and participatory research. Her work explores how representation and accessibility are shaped through fashion and emerging technologies. Through her project Reimagining the Runway, she examines how fashion can be redesigned as a system of care, access, and collective imagination.
Aradhana Verma
Aradhana Verma is a designer from India and a Master’s student in Inclusive Design at OCAD University. With a background in fashion and UI/UX design, her work explores cultural inclusivity, decolonising design, and storytelling through digital experiences, focusing on creating meaningful systems that celebrate diverse ways of thinking.
Ann de Sequeira
Ann is an accountant-turned-strategist who completed her Master’s in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University. Her background spans corporate strategy, innovation, and public sector policy.
Sara Blanke
Sara is a qualitative researcher, centering storytelling and collaboration in her approach to knowledge-building. Her practice is grounded in integrity and honouring lived experiences. Sara is passionate about connecting research to meaningful, collective change in ways that remain accountable to the community. Her collaborative student work has received an honourable mention from the Association of Professional Futurists.
Malu Cascelli
Malu is a Brazilian service designer and dreamer, dedicated to creating transformative change in the world. With experience across private and not-for-profit sectors, she weaves systems thinking, visual storytelling, research, facilitation, and co-design. Her futures work intersects embodied practice, participatory design, and decolonial futures-making to challenge systems of today and imagine new possibilities for tomorrow.
Dania Adam
Dania is a strategist and storyteller. From Lagos to Toronto, across financial services, creative entrepreneurship and corporate communications, her practice has been the same: connecting dots into something worth following. She manages communications at a legal-tech firm and is completing her MDes in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University.
Valeria Suing
Valeria Suing is a designer based in Toronto. Her work is at the intersection of coffee and strategic foresight, exploring more sustainable and equitable futures through human-centred and community-driven design.
Aisling Nolan
Aisling Nolan is a circular design strategist rethinking how we consume, reuse, and value everyday goods. Her work reveals how systems of convenience, cost, and cognitive load shape sustainable behaviour at scale, and how redesigning those systems can make sustainability the effortless default.
Meg Lin
Meg is a strategic product designer with a background in human-centered and graphic design. Her expertise spans user research, data visualization, and problem-solving. Her graduate MRP explored AI-driven futures and Gen Z loneliness, equipping young people with resilient strategies for their desired futures.
Janine Pierre
Janine Pierre is a Multidisciplinary Design Leader and Innovation Strategist specializing in foresight and systems thinking. With experience across advisory, crisis management, finance, and non-profit sectors, she leads high-impact work. A 2025 CivicAction DiverseCity Fellow, she advances housing and community resilience through design and cross-sector collaboration.
Aliya Ahmed-Mohamoud
Aliya Ahmed-Mohamoud is a Somali-Canadian storyteller and designer who focuses on the intersection of community knowledge, Afrofuturism, and strategic foresight. Drawing on lived cultural experience, she challenges dominant futures frameworks by centering Black diasporic oral traditions as powerful and legitimate tools for imagining more inclusive futures.
Jeff Ranson
Jeff leads Responsible Development for YZD, a 370-acre city-in-a-city on a former airfield in Toronto. He spent two decades at the intersection of sustainable cities, public policy, and innovation, and received an MDes and the President’s Award for graduate studies at OCAD U for his work on low-carbon housing in Peru.
Markhan Hussain
Markhan holds a Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University. Her career spans project management, marketing, customer experience design, festival management, and exhibition curation. She brings an interdisciplinary approach grounded in research, systems thinking, and foresight to the work she does across private and public sector organizations.
Marolin Solano
Marolin Solano is a UX Researcher and Experience Designer specializing in digital banking and complex product ecosystems. She is currently pursuing a Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation at OCAD University. With over five years of experience, she leads human-centered research that transforms insights into impactful solutions. Her work spans innovation across both public and private sectors, where she fosters collaboration, empathy, and psychologically safe teams to drive meaningful change.
Angelique Gitanjali Saunders
Angelique works as a User Experience Researcher for digital experiences. Her eldest daughter Pauline has changed her world with her disability. From the day she was born, she began to see different systems at play that were constantly at odds. This is what brought her to OCADU to get her degree in Inclusive Design.
Roxi Nicolussi
Roxi Nicolussi is an innovation strategist, futurist, and Founder of The Big Bold Consulting Company. With a Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation, she has spent the past decade solving complex problems and driving intentional innovation.
Everton Lewis
Everton Lewis leads Futures Design at OCAD U CO, advising clients and enabling teams to deliver impactful, forward-looking work. With experience leading large design teams and small boutique consultancies, he brings deep expertise in service design and innovation. An award-winning practitioner and university lecturer.