Pierre-Yves Panis

Pierre-Yves — who’ll insist you call him PY — is a designer with over 30 years of practice across non-profits, consulting, and global corporations. Born in Kinshasa, raised in Belgium, he's lived and worked across Canada, Zimbabwe, the US, France, and the Netherlands before returning to France in 2023. He holds a degree from Ensci Les Ateliers (École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle), Paris.

Since 2000, PY has led design at Moen, Legrand, Orange, Philips Lighting, and Signify, and served as Global VP of Experience for Publicis Sapient France.

User experience has always been his north star. For nine years, he ran Design Co Operation, an NGO he founded in Harare, Zimbabwe, co-developing products and services with small-scale informal entrepreneurs — work that directly increased their earnings. In the corporate world, he consistently used design to look at the whole picture, never hesitating to reframe a problem when observation called for it. As he liked to tell non-designer colleagues: “Don’t ask a designer to just create a bridge — ask them what’s the best way to cross the river.”

PY has served two terms on the Executive Board of the World Design Organization, advised the Design Management Institute, and chairs the Professional Advice Council of CY School of Design in France.

At the heart of it all: people. Users, customers, and the teams he’s built and led — always with compassion, curiosity, and a relentless drive to push design further.