Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian

Why organisations work with Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian

• She built the experience function at WeTransfer from inside the executive team across ten years, a rare track record of innovation craft sustained at commercial scale rather than delivered as one-off consulting.
• She has a method for staging ideas in public, tested at the scale of a 17,500-seat Hollywood Bowl performance with NASA scientists and at the scale of small-room design studios at Google, Mattel and Unilever.
• Her academic foundation is unusual for a creative director: a PhD in Human Geography and Political Philosophy from Royal Holloway alongside an RCA Design Interactions MA, which gives her work argumentative spine rather than spectacle alone.
• She runs the University of the Underground, a tuition-free postgraduate institution whose advisory board includes Noam Chomsky, Paola Antonelli and Jill Tarter, so she arrives in a room with an active network of researchers and practitioners across science, design and politics.
• Design Week inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2023 alongside Jonathan Ive, Es Devlin and Neville Brody, the field’s most explicit signal that her practice has moved from emerging to canonical.

Biography highlights

• Chief of Experiences at WeTransfer from 2012 to 2022, ten years on the executive team during the company’s growth into a global creative platform.
• Founder and director of the University of the Underground, a tuition-free MA programme hosted at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.
• Designer of Experiences at the SETI Institute since 2013; Vice Chair of the IAF Committee for the Cultural Utilisation of Space.
• Founder and director of the International Space Orchestra, performed with Sigur Ros at the Hollywood Bowl to 17,500 people.
• PhD, Royal Holloway, University of London (Human Geography and Political Philosophy); MA, Royal College of Art (Design Interactions, Dunne and Raby).
• Design Week Awards Hall of Fame, 2023. WIRED Innovation Fellowship, 2014. Karman Fellowship, 2022. Arts Council England Exceptional Award for Disaster Playground.

Biography

Most companies treat innovation as an internal practice: research teams, pilots, internal demos, the occasional product launch. The harder discipline is staging an idea so that customers, staff and the broader public feel it. Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian has spent fifteen years building a method for that second discipline, first inside a scaling technology company, then as a commissioned director for brands and cultural institutions.

She joined WeTransfer in 2012 as its first Head of Experiences and stayed for a decade, eventually serving as Chief of Experiences on the executive team. Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios operated inside WeTransfer as its user experience and innovation department, with a remit that grew from public projects with creative communities to B Corp development, US business expansion, and the founding of the editorial platform WePresent and the University of the Underground.

Her parallel practice is anchored by the International Space Orchestra, which she founded in 2012 with scientists and astronauts from NASA Ames, the SETI Institute and the International Space University. The project produced a feature film, a Hollywood Bowl performance with Sigur Ros, and a recording that was played from the International Space Station. It is the clearest example of her core craft, which is the orchestration of scientific and institutional collaborators into something a non-expert audience can feel.

In 2017 she founded the University of the Underground, a tuition-free postgraduate programme at Sandberg Instituut whose advisory board includes Noam Chomsky, Paola Antonelli and Jill Tarter. Design Week inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2023 alongside Jonathan Ive, Es Devlin and Neville Brody.

Key speaking topics

• Immersive experiences as innovation practice
• Building creative communities inside commercial organisations
• Public-facing storytelling for science and technology
• Cultural strategy and brand
• Interdisciplinary collaboration across science, design and the arts
• Space culture and the public communication of complex science
• Independent institution building

Ideal for

• Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Brand Officers and creative directors at consumer or technology brands looking to move from advertising-led growth to experience-led growth.
• Heads of Innovation and Chief Strategy Officers whose pilots are not translating into customer-visible products or cultural relevance.
• Cultural institutions, design and architecture studios, and science communication leads commissioning ambitious public projects.
• Senior leadership teams inside scale-up technology companies considering how to build a brand that creators and partners care about.

Audience outcomes

• A working definition of what an experience function does inside a commercial company, drawn from ten years of operating one at WeTransfer.
• Concrete patterns for staging an idea publicly, from Hollywood Bowl scale down to a small studio activation.
• A view of how scientific institutions, creative communities and commercial brands can be brought into the same room without flattening any of them.
• A reading on where the experience economy is heading, grounded in her current work at SETI, the International Astronautical Federation and the University of the Underground.