Sunny Panashar
Founder of the Ethnic Diversity Excellence Programme | Ensera Design (formerly Kinneir Dufort)
Sunny Panashar is a design industry leader and passionate advocate for equity, diversity and inclusion in innovation. As the driving force behind Ensera Design’s (formerly Kinneir Dufort) pioneering Ethnic Diversity Excellence (EDE) Programme, Sunny has led one of the UK’s most impactful initiatives to address the underrepresentation of ethnic minority talent in the design and product development sector. The programme was created as a proactive response to the visible lack of diversity within the UK design industry, providing funded internships, mentoring, sponsorship and industry-wide support to help talented students overcome barriers to entering the profession.
Having often found himself as the only person of colour in the room throughout his career, Sunny transformed personal experience into meaningful action. Through the EDE Programme, he has brought together leading organisations across design, engineering and consumer products to create lasting pathways into the industry while inspiring the next generation of diverse design talent.
Sunny offers an insightful and practical perspective on building inclusive cultures, challenging systemic barriers, and demonstrating how diversity drives better innovation, stronger business outcomes and more human-centred design. His work is a powerful reminder that creating products for a diverse world starts with creating diverse teams.
Laura Tuck
Design Engineer | Young Engineer of the Year | Innovator in Women’s Health and Inclusive Design
Laura Tuck is an award-winning design engineer whose work demonstrates the transformative power of engineering to improve lives. Recently named Young Engineer of the Year by the Royal Academy of Engineering, Laura has built an impressive career developing products that tackle some of society’s most pressing challenges, from advancing women’s health to improving dignity, equality and access to essential technologies.
Her work spans groundbreaking organisations. At The Washing Machine Project, Laura led the development of the Divya manual washing machine, an affordable, off-grid solution that significantly reduces the physical burden of handwashing clothes in low-resource communities, freeing up time for education, work and family life. At Elvie, she contributed to innovative women’s health technologies, while her work with PEEQUAL has helped redesign public sanitation through the world’s first women’s urinal, challenging longstanding inequalities in access to public spaces and reducing queues at events.
Laura will share practical insights into designing products with purpose, demonstrating how engineering and human-centred design can address global inequalities while creating commercially successful innovations. Her work is a compelling example of how thoughtful design can improve health, promote dignity and deliver meaningful social impact at scale.