Kindling Transitions

Oskar Stokholm Østergaard

Oskar is an independent transition-oriented designer and practitioner and founder of Warmer Experiments°. For several years, Oskar led the exploration of the intersection between experimental futures-oriented design approaches, collective imagination, and systemic change at Danish Design Center.Oskar builds capacity for working creatively with long-term transitions both inside and between organizations, and designs and facilitates transition-oriented design and change processes, trains change agents, and writes and designs stories and speculative artifacts from thought-provoking futures. Throughout his work, Oskar tries to stimulate the collective imagination so we might dream up radically different and inspiring possible futures that yield new perspectives on the complex societal challenges we face in the present. Over the years, Oskar has facilitated processes and trained hundreds of change agents from organizations ranging from governments, ministries, and large corporations, to design studios, NGOs, and academic institutions across the world.Oskar will be your main host for the course and will be there throughout the entire week.

Christian Bason

Christian is Co-founder of Transition Collective, a public-purpose enterprise, and Adjunct Professor with University of Technology Sydney. He is the former CEO of the Danish Design Center. Previously, he was Director of MindLab, the Danish government’s innovation lab. He is the author of nine books on leadership, innovation and design, including "Expand: Stretching the Future by Design" (2022).Christian is a frequent keynote speaker to government, business and civic leaders at home and globally on topics such as innovation, design, expansive thinking, missions, organizational redesign, leadership, foresight, and sustainable transitions. He has acted as a leader, facilitator and advisor in a wide range of contexts, focusing on how to innovate and address complex societal challenges across multiple sectors. Christian has extensive experience delivering executive training for leaders in business, government and the non-profit sector. Currently he works with, amongst others, CEDEP/INSEAD, Henley Business School, Parsons School of Design, Copenhagen Business School and the European School of Administration.

Jennie Winhall

Jennie was a founding member of Participle where she spent 10 years as Innovation Director, designing the relational public services outlined in the popular book Radical Help and supporting their scale-up across the UK both as social enterprises and through the organisation’s influence on public policy. Jennie designed and built a number of new services as exemplars of how more relational care and welfare could work in practice. She worked directly with the most disadvantaged groups in society to co-design new approaches that better suited their lives and aspirations, and ran multi-disciplinary teams to design and prototype new services and turn them into working social ventures which she helped to scale in partnership with local and central government.Jennie started working with the Rockwool Foundation in Denmark in 2014 to set up a new Interventions Unit to tackle complex societal challenges at scale. She developed the unit’s innovation methodology, and led several multidisciplinary teams to co-create new approaches to youth employment, education, vocational training, integration and mental wellbeing with young people and their families.Read more about Jennie’s work here.

Cameron Tonkinwise

Professor Cameron Tonkinwise is an international expert in design studies and transition design and the Research Director of the Design Innovation Research Centre at UTS. He writes and speaks extensively on the power of design to drive systems-level change to achieve more sustainable and equitable futures.Cameron has long advocated for the field of Design Studies and its importance to ensuring the social responsibility of design professionals. His expertise has reshaped traditional thinking around how designers should be educated, and he has established Design Studies programs at the Parsons The New School for Design (New York), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and UTS, among others, that have transformed international design curricula. He has written a number of influential articles on design thinking, design ethics, design research and speculative design.More recently, Cameron has emerged as a leading voice in the field of Transition Design, as part of his long-standing research and teaching around Sustainable Design. He was an early champion of the Sharing Economy while taking over the leadership of the EcoDesign Foundation from its founders, Tony Fry & Anne-Marie Willis. This expertise shapes Cameron’s work at the Design Innovation Research Centre at UTS, which has a focus on multidisciplinary social and service design research. Under Cameron’s leadership, the research team now incorporates a transition design focus into their projects, tackling immediate, organisation-specific design challenges while simultaneously addressing the underlying systemic issues that cause these challenges to occur.

Gry Worre Hallberg

Gry is founder of Sisters Hope and operates at the intersection of performance art, research, activism and future studies continuously executed in 1:1 co-created experiments such as Dome of Visions, Sisters Academy and In100Y.Gry’s work is currently rooted in the vision of a potential future world — The Sensuous Society: Beyond economic rationality — Suggesting a sensuous mode of being in the world. Gry’s practice is unfolded in her ongoing research-projects on how the sensuous carves a path towards a more sustainable future - E.g see PhD dissertation (University of Copenhagen) and her two TEDx talks – respectively Sensuous Society (2013 at TEDxCPH) and Sensuous Learning (2015 at TEDxUppsalaUniversity). For many years Gry has aimed at enriching environments with an aesthetic dimension through interventionist, interactive and immersive performance art strategies. Gry is the co-founder of a range of organizations and movements within the field of performance art applied in a series of different everyday-life contexts, among them Sisters Hope, House of Futures, Fiction Pimps, Club de la Faye, Staging Transitions and The Poetic Revolution. She is a member of the global, urban network Theatrum Mundi initiated by prof. Richard Sennett (NYU and LSE) and have completed several projects, articles and publications on intervening and relational performance art and new societies.Gry has been an external lecturer at Performance Design, Roskilde University (2012-2017) and carry a MA in Theatre- and Performance Studies from The University of Copenhagen and Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro with a minor in Cultural Economy and Aesthetic Leadership from Copenhagen Business School. Gry has curated the performance-art program at Roskilde festival (2013-2017) and is the artistic director of respectively the Dome of Visions and Sisters Hope (on-going projects: Sisters Academy, Sensuous City, Sensuous Governing and Sisters Hope Home).

Sune Knudsen

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