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.

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.

Cassie Robinson

The focus of Cassie’s work nowadays is on practices for systemic transitions, in a time between worlds, and the inner and outer conditions needed for this work. Her practice grounds are philanthropic institutions, wealth holder communities and the Wealth Defence Industry, and within initiatives that are paying attention to what’s being birthed and what is dying at the same time.

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 artistic research PhD from 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).

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.

Sara Gry Striegler

Sara Gry Striegler is CEO at Nordic Health Lab, cross-cutting and bridging the public healthcare system with private companies to co-create sustainable solutions. She is founder of Kindred Lab for Transitions and previously Director for Societal Transitions at Danish Design Center pioneering the work with futures design and mission-oriented innovation. Over the past 15 years, Sara has worked to address complex societal challenges and drive change and innovation within the major agendas of health, welfare, youth mental health and ageing. She has previously worked to develop and advise both public organizations and foundations in Denmark, the Nordics and internationally.Sara is an experienced speaker and co-author of several books on public sector innovation, with an upcoming book, Navigating Societal Change through Design (Policy Press), providing four navigation points for ‘pathfinders’ to address the major complex societal challenges the world faces today.Sara is Chair at The Social Innovation Academy. She holds a M.Sc. Engineering (Design Engineer) from the Technical University of Denmark and an executive education in Scenario Planning and Foresight from Oxford University and Saïd Business School.

Sine Egede Eskesen

As the Chief Visionary Officer, Sine Egede Eskesen leads the strategic and philanthropic development of the Bikuben Foundation. The Bikuben Foundation is working to solve some of the most complex problems in society. The Bikuben Foundation joins forces with others to get to the root of problems, initiate action, test new solutions and train our ability to imagine societal change.Sine Egede Eskesen has more than 20 years of experience working in the social sector as a director, consultant, advisor and board member. Among several boards, Sine Egede Eskesen currently serves on the board of Thoravej 29, a community that works to create positive social change by bringing together experts and creative thinkers through physical encounters.

Sune Knudsen

Co-founder of Transition Collective. From 2015 to 2024 he was COO of the Danish Design Center, a government-backed non-profit foundation. He previously held leadership and other positions at Implement Consulting Group, The Danish Business Authority, The Danish Ministry of Employment, MindLab, and the Danish Armed Forces. Sune is the co-author of several books (in Danish), including "The Organization Was Set Free and the Leadership had to be Rediscovered" (2023) and “Put the Citizen in the Center” (2009). Sune is M.Sc. (Political Science) from Copenhagen University. Sune lives with his family in Virum north of Copenhagen.

Vanessa Reid

Vanessa Reid is an architect of cultural evolution who works at the intersection between systems and soul. Her primary practice grounds are as core faculty and lead designer at Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning and co-founder of the Living Wholeness Institute. She has worked around the world to co-create cultures and communities of practice dedicated to systems transformation amidst complexity, collapse and chaos. She is a writer and poet, and holds Masters degrees in both architecture and process-oriented psychology. Vanessa is the former executive director of Montreal’s Santropol Roulant and executive publisher of the Utne-award winning ascent magazine. Vanessa holds a particular call to work with transitions, transformation and the natural cycles of life - from the mess and excitement of creating new systems and initiatives to Conscious Closure and the Wild life of Dying.

Cassie Robinson

Cassie works at both the Paul Hamlyn Foundation as an Associate Director and as Associate Director of Emerging Futures at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. In addition to these two roles she is working with Arising Quo, a transformative wealth redistribution project in Europe, in a field-building role with Partners for a New Econonomy globally and as a consultant to ClientEarth’s Innovation Lab. She’s the Co-founder of Stewarding Loss – supporting civil society organisations to die well, the Care + Climate cultural space in London, and The Point People.She runs a Philanthropy in Transitions Lab for Philea and has Policy Fellowships at both the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University. As a creative entrepreneur and strategic designer, she’s won awards from Nesta as a Creative Pioneer, an Ideas and Pioneers grant from Paul Hamlyn Foundation and a Leader in Philanthropy award from the European Foundation Centre. She holds a 1st Class BA hons in Fashion Design and Textiles, and an MSc in Applied Positive Psychology from UEL. Cassie is also certified as an ORSC practitioner, a CTI coach and has a certificate in energy chakra healing from the College of Psychic Studies.Cassie currently has Board roles at Organise HQ and the Real Farming Trust, and is on the Strategy Group of the Funders’ Collaborative Hub. She teaches on the MSc in Ecological Design at Schumacher College, is on the Faculty of States of Change, and is one of the International Futures Forum Clan.Until November 2021 Cassie was Deputy Director of Funding Strategy at The National Lottery Community Fund where she ran a £60 Million a year funding portfolio. She’s created an extensive archive of all the work, which tells her story and shares lots of resources too.Read more about Cassie's work here.