The Leadership Summit
on the Business of Design:
The Changing Economics of Design

Dave Gilmore is the President & Chief Executive Officer of DesignIntelligence. He is a frequent university lecturer as well as corporate speaker across the Built Environment industry. His work involves frequent interaction with leadership teams and governance entities regarding leadership transition, business sustainability, and organizational resilience. He serves as a strategic advisor to many of the largest and most successful Built Environment industry firms in the United States. Dave is also the Founder and Managing Director of The Tricord Group, a boutique equity fund with partners in Atlanta, Boston, and Minneapolis.

Jennifer Kolstad is the first Global Design and Brand Director at Ford Motor Company, and the first design leader to establish a vision for environmental design.

Since joining Ford in 2019, Jennifer has envisioned the future of workplace, retail, hospitality, and community at Ford. Introducing the legacy brand to research-led design, she pivoted the design team toward a human-centered methodology collaborating with external luminaries, product design, UX, technology, and global brand.

Jennifer has spent her career systematically advancing the design industry by challenging best practice, disrupting institutionalized expectations, and introducing new thinking to every project category she plays in. Integrating complementary core competencies to expand the value of design provides greater opportunity for professionals to impact complicated problem sets involving business, community, social justice, and human productivity.

Iñaki Alday is a registered architect, landscape architect and urbanist graduated from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in 1992. Together with Margarita Jover, he founded aldayjover architecture and landscape in 1996 in Barcelona, renowned for its leadership in a new approach to the relation between cities and rivers, including flooding and natural dynamics. The work has been published and displayed widely and received multiple awards including the European Public Space Prize.

Alday is the Dean of the Tulane University School of Architecture since 2018. Previously, he served as associate professor at the Valles School of Architecture (Barcelona), and as Quesada Professor and Chair at the University of Virginia. Alday is author of several books including the most recent Cities and Rivers (ACTAR, 2023).

Patrick Chopson, AIA, is Co-Founder and Principal of cove, an AI-powered architecture firm transforming how buildings are designed and delivered. A licensed architect with 20+ years of experience, technologist and building scientist, Patrick focuses on the intersection of AI and Architecture.

He previously co-founded the building performance consultancy Pattern r+d and co-authored Build Like It’s the End of the World (Wiley, 2025), a guide to decarbonizing AEC. His work has been featured in Architect Magazine, TechCrunch, and ArchDaily, and he regularly collaborates with developers and industry leaders on next-generation solutions.

With experience in mechanical engineering design, project management, and partner-in-charge responsibilities on over 270 facilities, Todd is an expert in higher education and lab facilities. He has presented to international conferences on sustainability in HVAC design and has also published on the topic. Todd continues to be inspired by the experts in the field he works with. That, along with his wholehearted belief that he is making a difference in the world through the work he does, keeps him pushing forward. Todd founded the I2SL Georgia Chapter and is a guest lecturer of a graduate-level architecture class at Georgia Tech. In his free time, Todd enjoys brewing beer and working on his jeep. He is also the Scoutmaster of his sons’ Boy Scouts troop — and he borrows his personal motto from the old campsite adage: “leave it better than you found it.”

Brian Olasov has more than three decades of strategic business and capital market experience as well as an extensive background in real estate capital markets, troubled mortgage loans and banking challenges. Brian is sought after for national and international speaking engagements on a regular basis to present on the state of residential and commercial mortgage markets, MBS litigation, structured finance products, appraisal and valuation issues and banking and lending regulations. From 2008 to 2010, Brian served as an adjunct professor at Emory Law School, and he has guest-lectured at the graduate real estate programs of Georgia State University, Emory, Columbia University, Georgetown University and Wharton.

Francisco Javier Rodríguez-Suárez, FAIA, is the Clayton T. Miers Professor in Architecture and Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois. Professor Rodríguez-Suárez studied architecture at Georgia Tech, Paris, and Harvard GSD, where he earned a Master of Architecture with Distinction winning the American Institute of Architects Medal, the Portfolio Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship. For nine years, he served as Dean of the University of Puerto Rico School of Architecture and has taught and lectured at various universities in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the United States. He is a Fellow of the AIA and was selected by El Nuevo Día newspaper as one of the ten most influential pioneers in Puerto Rico for the year 2008, when he collaborated with artist Ai Wei Wei on the Ordos 100 project in China. He recently finished his term as President of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), an organization that had previously recognized him as Distinguished Professor.

Donny leads the Newcomb & Boyd Special Technologies Group and has a multitude of experience designing intelligent buildings and technologically sophisticated campuses. His background is in integrated design with network-enabled systems. Projects include aviation facilities, healthcare buildings, judicial facilities, advanced technology developments, military installations, data centers, mixed-use developments, performing arts, and higher education facilities. He is an intelligent buildings industry thought-leader and project facilitator and has presented on Smart Building design at many national conferences.

Adrian Parr Zaretsky is an internationally recognized philosopher, cultural thinker, and creative practitioner. Zaretsky is the Dean of the University of Oregon’s College of Design, Senior Fellow of DesignIntelligence, and UNESCO Chair on Water and Human Settlements. She is the founding signatory of the Geneva Actions on Human Water Security and helped found the National Dean’s Equity and Inclusion Initiative. Zaretsky has published eight books, produced four award-winning films, and exhibited her creative works at the European Cultural Centre’s Venice Art and Architecture Biennales.