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 and brought them to market. 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.

Yuri giving a talk on making Bangkok more resilient against rapid, unprecedented stressors like pollution, the pandemic, and a stressed public utility system.

Specialties: Human-centered design | Strategic foresight | Mixed-methods UX research | Systems thinking | Serious games | Engineering for impact

Kristen Pearson brings an almost unfair level of expertise to the table—deep training in archaeology, ethnographic fieldwork, and anthropological theory, honed at Penn and Harvard and tested across continents. She is adept at identifying the roles of taken-for-granted structures, spaces, and things in shaping everyday experiences. Her work has revealed the hidden stories in ancient garments, mapped resilience in endangered craft traditions, and uncovered the cultural logics buried in the identities of small business owners. She’s conducted research in nomadic communities, remote museums, and the inner-city, all while wrangling languages, fibers, and frameworks with equal finesse. A Fulbright scholar and NSF fellow, Kristen doesn’t just know the methods—she helps shape them.

Whether working with first-time entrepreneurs, healthcare designers, or international heritage institutions, Kristen brings unmatched precision and care to every research engagement. When she teaches—at Harvard or out in the field—she does so with the insight of someone who’s not just studied how people live, but lived alongside them with her expertise in method and praxis. If the challenge demands rigor, empathy, and a wide-angle view—Kristen’s the one you want thinking alongside you.

Kristen with young participants in an ethnographic research / cultural heritage documentation project in Mongolia.

Specialties: Ethnographic research | Archaeological science | Material culture | Cultural heritage methods | Cross-cultural UX research | Participatory design

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