Apala Lahiri Chavan is a world-renowned expert on cross-cultural design, innovation and UX strategy. She is President of Human Factors International (Middle East, Asia, Africa and Australia). Her passion is to envision how user experience can be inclusive, democratic and a change agent. She is also fascinated by changes in user experience across time and space. She has developed a vast array of data-gathering techniques such as Bollywood Method, Bizarre Bazaar, and Funky Facilitator to help understand the user experience in diverse cultural and economic environments.

Apala is an award-winning designer (International Audi Design Award 1996). She co-edited the book Innovative Solutions: What Designers Need to Know for Today’s Emerging Markets and her TEDx talk is Three Laws of User Experience. Her model of the future ‘No Waiting’ was selected for publication in the World Future Society journal.