We see what others don’t. Your people will notice.
If your challenge lives somewhere between behavioral insight, systems design, and social impact—you’re in the right hands.
Yuri Zaitsev has over 10 years of experience stepping into tangled messes – across industries, cultures, and continents – and coming out with something clear, sharp, and immediately useful. He has engineered laptops, robots, and market-leading, minimally invasive product lines in orthopedic surgery. He has helped communities become more resilient, from the streets of Thailand to toxic workplaces in the USA. He has made justice reform a game worth winning – literally. He helps clients move through problems when the questions are messy, the data is fragmented, and the stakes are high.
When not in the field, Yuri has lectured at top institutions around the world. His approach—a hybrid of engineering, human-centered design, strategic foresight, and serious game design—shapes both his graduate courses and executive seminars in advanced research techniques. He’s taught at Stanford d.School, Stanford GSB, UC Berkeley, Harvard Business School, and given talks at numerous conferences and organizations.
Specialties: Human-centered design | Strategic foresight | Mixed-methods UX research | Systems thinking | Serious games | Engineering for impact
YZDW also includes a roster of brilliant minds from the top research institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and Yale. Each is an expert at mixed-methods research and implementing design solutions. We invite them specifically for their expertise in your project needs.
Specialties: Trauma Informed Design | Behavioral Design | Deep Contextual Methods | Design Ops | Accessibility Centered Design | Service Design | Ethnographic research | Archaeological science | Material culture | Cultural heritage methods | Cross-cultural UX research | Participatory design