HOLIS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Advisor for Internet of Things
Alexandra is an interaction designer, product designer, entrepreneur based in London. She was named 1st in a list of 100 Internet of Things Influencers (Postscapes, 2016), 2nd in Top 100 Internet of Things Thought Leaders (Onalytica, 2014) and in the Top 100 Influential Tech Women on Twitter (Business Insider, 2014), Smith & Williamson Power 100 (2017).
Alvaro is mathematician and project manager with experience in small and large companies. His problem-solving oriented mind makes him always look for continuous improvement. He is passionate about service design, and thinks it is the key to make the world a better place to live.
Amira is a designer, an entrepreneur and a researcher who is passionate about using her design skills to catalyze change. She's triggered by problems, world potentials and solution hunting while believing in innovation, creative thinking and story telling as a lens.
Job Titles:
- Advisor for Complex Futures and Education
Anab is a designer, futurist, filmmaker and educator. As Co-founder and Director of Superflux, she hopes to realise the vision of the Studio as a new kind of design practice, responsive to the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. She has received awards from ICSID, UNESCO, Geneva Human Rights Festival, Apple Computers Inc., and the UK Government's Innovation Department.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor at Corvinus University of Budapest
- Expert
Attila is associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest, Institute of Marketing and Media, Department of Marketing, Media and Designcommunication and founder of coandco.cc. He is a designer artist, with his company coandco.cc holds several international design awards such as Red Dot. Attila is the author of designcommunication, DIS.CO, complex creative design methodology.
Job Titles:
- Expert
- Program Lead & Social Innovator
Expert on sustainability, grassroots leadership, human-centred and social innovation. Avinash is an award-winning grassroots youth leader with a focus on environmental sustainability. Back in India, He worked with over 5000+ volunteers and 100+ full-time employees as the CEO of Waste Warriors Society - a grassroots nonprofit providing waste management solutions to communities living in eco-sensitive zones of the Himalayan region. Currently, Avinash is a master's student of Public Management at the University of Potsdam as a Helmut Schmidt Scholarship holder by DAAD. Further, he practices Design Thinking at Hasso Plattner Institute Germany. He can be found running, cycling, or climbing when not debating on environmental issues.
Freelancer designer. Previously head of the MOME Department of Design, co-founder of Sausagefence! design studio, designer of the iconic Hungarian Mustache Ba, P-shaped Bike Parkers and BKV Passenger Information System Designer.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Expert
Barbara is an assistant professor, theoretician, designer, author, and Design for Europe Ambassador. Co-founder and leader of the department of design theory at the Pekinpah Association, and director of the Ljubljana Institute of Design, an academic research organisation. Since 2010, with Petra Černe Oven, she has been co-editing Zbirka 42, a series of books on design, under the auspices of the Pekinpah Association.
Cansu is an early stage investor for tech for good companies. As senior partner, her focus at BGV is building meaningful partnerships for their portfolio teams and the fund itself. She also supports fundraising efforts for their investment vehicles. She has been involved with early stage ventures as founder, operator, mentor and now investor throughout her career in tech.
Dana is an interdisciplinary artist working between the boundaries of art and design, with a focus on social and climate justice. Amongst others, her participatory projects have been presented at Tate Modern, Museum of London, and London Short Film Festival (UK), Incheon Art Platform (South Korea), Centre for Art on Migration Politics (CAMP), Tanzhaus NRW (Germany), La Virgule (France), and Tranzit (Romania).
Daniel is a Budapest based graphic designer who graduated from the Royal College of Art, London. He is the co-founder of Diaméter Collective.
Dominika is a designer, researcher and social innovator based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She works at the intersection of social design and environmental transitions, focusing on creating balanced connections between human-made and natural systems. User experience researcher passionate about psychology. Explorer, looking for connections between the urban and rural tomorrows.
Job Titles:
- Chef, Plant - Based Cuisine Enthusiast & Promoter
Out of her passion for cooking, she abandoned her career in the film industry. She draws inspiration from her travels and sentiments to develop recipes full of distinct flavours. She can make anything into a sandwich and will convince the most prominent sceptics to eat tofu. Simple seasonal ingredients and cooking joy- the secret combination she applies to every meal. She runs workshops and authorises numerous articles and ebooks published with RoślinnieJemy. Daily, she shares her recipes on Instagram -> @domtargosz (we highly recommend checking this!).
Job Titles:
- Head of the Kindergarten Club at the Real Pearl Foundation 's "Tanoda" Program
Dorottya works as a teacher, mentor and communication specialist for non-governmental organizations working for Roma inclusion and equal opportunities in Hungary. Her main areas of expertise are reading motivation, mother tongue development, she currently works mainly with the 3-4- year-old age group. She strongly believes that the for-profit and non-profit sectors could learn a lot from each other.
Job Titles:
- Social Designer and Design Strategist
Dr Bori Fehér is a social designer and design strategist focused on resilience and sustainability. Bori heads the Social Design Hub at MOME Innovation Center (MOME Interaction Design - Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest). She has facilitated students and researchers in social, eco and humanitarian design practice-based research projects for over a decade. Her research focuses on the climate crisis and its relations to social resilience, particularly on underprivileged communities and organisations on the rural periphery. She is the Co-Chair of the International Social Design Network she co-founded in 2020. Since 2014 Bori has been a Visiting Scholar at the Maryland Institute College of Art Center for Social Design in Baltimore, USA. She has a background in architecture and previously practised it in New York, USA.
Job Titles:
- Advisor for Global Innovation Design
- Senior Lecturer at Royal College of Art
Dr John Stevens joined the Royal College of Art in 2013 to help launch the new Global Innovation Design MA. John's research interests concern the application of design methods to emerging contexts of innovation such as service design, multi-disciplinary design and design management, especially applied to social, cross-cultural and humanitarian innovation. This necessarily encompasses the design of products, interactions and systems.
Job Titles:
- Architect at Paradigma Ariadné
Architect, writer, critic and co-founder of paradigma:ariadné. He studied architecture at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and at the West Hungarian University. He is a former president of Budapest Architecture Student Studio and author of dozen essays, studies and articles in the topic of architecture, urbanism and politics. In his architecture related works he always collaborate with artist, designers and urban thinkers.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor at Corvinus University of Budapest
- Expert
Dóra is associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest, Institute of Marketing and Media, head of the Department of Marketing, Media and Designcommunication. Her areas of research include diffusion of new technology in personal communication, designcommunication, co-creation, projective research techniques. Her areas of education involve: strategic and creative planning of marketing communication, design management, advertising management.
I am curious about people's culture, stories and needs. I am very keen to listen, see and discover how they think, how they behave, why and how we can help. As a Design Thinking Consultant, I am collaborating in the development of design projects for social and technology innovation at Bayteq in Quito, where we centre our research and outcomes in humans.
Job Titles:
- Co - Founder and Food Curator
Eszter is a curator and cultural mediator who is interested in CEE regional creative industry and local movements. She is the co-founder of Holis and was part of the team until 2019.
Fanni Csernátony is addicted to design workshops and co-creation ever since she started studying Product Design in Moholy Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME). She participated and organized several events focusing on creative teamwork. She believes that the design process works best if it involves people with different cultural and professional backgrounds.
Job Titles:
- Partner at Studio Rygalik
Gosia graduated from the Design Department at Warsaw's Academy of Fine Arts (2010 MA). She also studied at the Danmarks Designskole and gained her first professional design experience in Copenhagen. During the studies in Warsaw she was a member of the PG13 platform - responding to experimental design briefs, exhibiting, organizing and taking part in design workshops and competitions as well as industry supported projects.
Gunjan is a strategic designer and researcher who likes working on challenges that involve people, processes and systems. Her skills and tools are drawn from diverse fields of practice: human-centred design, business strategy, organizational change and education. She is a lifelong learner and enjoys herself best while working on transdisciplinary projects in diverse contexts.
Gábor is a UX team lead and product designer at Emarsys (part of SAP). He spends most of his time there facilitating a common understanding between teams and improving design processes. He's the co-founder of MOME ID, one of the most acknowledged product design courses in Hungary where he's a course leader, lecturer and mentor. With the MOME ID team, he's been running design camps since 2016 dealing with non-digital co-creation, design thinking, speculative design & service design.
Job Titles:
- Circular Design Strategist & Sustainability Advocate
A circular design consultant, strategist, leader and facilitator. His expertise comes from human-centred design, circular design, design process & management. He helps companies create product and service strategies based on innovation, sustainability and circular economy. Teacher at various universities around Europe. A co-founder of two design consultancies, Change Pilots in Poland and Next Agents in Sweden. He always brings a multicultural perspective thanks to years of practice abroad, including New York and London and such organisations as Parsons School of Design - The New School and IDEO. In the past 20 years, He worked as a strategist, manager, team leader, and sustainability advocate.
Job Titles:
- International & Public Affairs Manager at Dutch Design Foundation
Ingrid is a connector, conceptor, communicator with a focus on co/design for people and planet. Over the years she has initiated projects for the use of design as the driver for social innovation, economic growth and sustainable development. She has extensive experience in cross-sectorial partnerships between public authorities, industries, businesses and designers.
Iria's passion is using the power of design processes to transform people's lives. After studying psychology Iria started her career in 2001 working as user researcher / ethnographer (exploring people's needs in their context of use) working in several private companies in Barcelona. In 2005 she learned how to integrate user/cultural research with design and business processes.
Job Titles:
- Designer
- Designer from Design Studio Páben
Jana is a designer from design studio Pábení from the Czech Republic. Pábení wants to bring sustainability into the lives of organizations. Jana helps fulfil this vision with educational design, organizational culture projects and regenerative, circular service design. She deeply believes that the responsibility of designers is to take care of the needs of users and stakeholders as well as society and planet.
Job Titles:
- Design Researcher and Service Designer
Jimena is a curious creative and change maker, passionate about improving people's lives through design. She thrives on connecting with and learning from people, and on coming up with new and enhanced ways of doing things. She has vast experience in user research, creative facilitation and service design, having worked with multiple clients across varied industries. She works now as a Service Designer at wearereasonablepeople.
Joana is a researcher, architect and intermedial artist. She coordinates and curates Topias Urbanas (Urban Topias), an artistic and urban research project which, combining a processual, collaborative and relational ethos with a discursive and reflexive dimension generates experimental and interrogative cartographies of the multiple layers that compose urban space.
Job Titles:
- Advisor for Sustainability and Social Innovation
- Writer and Advisor
- Writer, Advisor, Speaker
John Thackara is a philosopher, writer and advisor. He helps companies and cities design innovation platforms that benefit all life, not just human life. His most recent book (of 12) is How To Thrive In the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow's World Today. John curated the celebrated Doors of Perception conference for 20 years, first in Amsterdam, and later in cities throughout India.
Job Titles:
- Special Education Teacher, 'Tanoda' Teacher at the Real Pearl Foundation
Julcsi has worked in the model village of the Foundation, in Told for 6 years. She joined at the very beginning of the Tanoda program during her university years as a volunteer. She now works with children from the age of 3 to 18, but her focus area is early childhood development, especially preschool programs and motor skill development.
Job Titles:
- Ambassador
- CEO
- Co - Founder of Change Pilots
Designer, researcher, and initiator of the ideas. Creates processes, experiences and visual systems that allow brands, organizations, and events communicate integral value offered to their users. Her experience comes from working with design studios, product and service companies as well as design and culture centers in Paris, Helsinki, New York, and across Poland. Passionate about sustainable development, Human-Centered Design, and mindfulness.
Károly is passionate about sailing, He holds a professional skipper licence and has 38 years of active sailing experience. Finding the next secluded bay is the ongoing motivation for him. He is the Founder of MandoLab startup incubator, and Co-Founder of CEEDAR sustainability and cleantech venture capital investment, and Co-Founder of MandoVentures Holding which is a consulting firm. Heartfelt local dishes, the wide-open horizon of the sea, the company of authentic people are some of the features of life that makes him happy.
Job Titles:
- Learning Designer and Facilitator
Lewis has worked internationally, across private and public sectors. From community-based outreach to formal youth work, arts outreach and structured programmes, working in roles that foster mutual learning and that can make meaningful change in individuals lives motivates him. Since moving to London 3 years ago he has been working freelance with lots of different projects and clients.
Born and raised in Bilbao, now living in Madrid. Graduated in Fine Arts and working as a digital designer since 2010. Focused in human centered design, creative problem solving and facilitation tools. Currently researching how people actually interact with technology, especially from a social, ethical and feminist perspective.
Job Titles:
- Advisor for Design Research and UK Academia
- Professor of Design, Product Designer
Martyn is a Professor of Design, product designer and design academic with 20 years research, teaching and leadership experience and is Head of Manchester School of Art Research Centre. Interested in the strategic role that design commands in a variety of settings, his research explores the approaches designers use to conceptualise and communicate the future.
Maxim is kind of designer, kind of entreprenuer. He is the founder of Holis. He also founded many other things. Some of them are still running. That makes him happy. Waste makes him angry. He also works as a consultant in social innovation, design, collective intelligence and management in general.
Job Titles:
- Senior Specialist, Innovator Supports
As Senior Specialist of Innovator Supports at the Center on the Developing Child, Harvard University, Melanie oversees the ongoing development of the Center's innovator support offerings including the IDEAS Impact Framework and ScienceXDesign. Melanie brings extensive experience in the design, implementation and evaluation of programs to support young children and families facing adversity, and she's passionate about helping innovators in the early childhood field use information and data to achieve better outcomes. She holds a doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the PGSP-Stanford Psy.D. Consortium.
Job Titles:
- Ambassador
- Product Designer, Assistant Professor at Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava
Michala is a designer working along boundaries of product and experience design. She leads commissioned research projects at the Institute of Design at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. Since 2013 she is a managing director of collaborative platform Flowers for Slovakia, focused on promotion of Slovak design abroad. In 2017 she has co-founded hardware startup Benjamin button.
Miguel is an integrated designer with experience in strategic design, storytelling, and prototyping. He is passionate about working in cross-disciplinary environments and characterized by bringing good vibes in the teams he joins.
Miriam works at the interface of ethnographic research and human-centered design. In her daily work she supports sustained business growth by the development of meaningful brands, services and products. As a freelancer she enables social-governmental institutions to read patterns in complex social systems, identify core-needs and facilitate the development of sustainable, user-centered concepts.
Márton implemented social development programs, economic development programs, and business development programs together with low-income families in disadvantaged settlements in Hungary for more than 10 years. In addition to his development and trainer work, he is an academic researcher as well.
Noelle is an explorer of the human experience. She has worked as a designer, innovator, inventor, and coach, and has built and led cross-functional teams in hardware, software, and service design as a consultant, in-house for start-ups, and in-house with some big brands. Currently, she guides leaders and organizations of people to discover their inner champions to achieve their visions.
Action philosopher, academician, consultant and expert. Oleg regularly serves as a guide, lecturer, facilitator, and action researcher for EU institutions, Baltic Sea regional partners, cultural institutions, universities, food start-ups, municipalities, and governments. Expert in existainability, regenerative paradigm, pollination, organisation culture and immersed culture. In the past 20 years, Oleg has been developing methods combining social science tools, aesthetic research and creative interventions, focusing on biological and physical systems and their affordances and demands. Co-founder of Growing Pathways, Leader of the Centre for Regenerative Transformation at Promentum, Postdoctoral Researcher at Københavns Universitet - University of Copenhagen, Teacher at Copenhagen Business School and Roskilde University and many more.
Pascal is a strategic designer based in Lausanne Switzerland. His work is focused on the orientation of people in their exploration of different futures. Pascal's approach mixes an ethnographic enquiry of people with the foresight practice of horizon scanning. He is also the founder of Whispers & Giants, a strategic discovery agency helping organisations succeed in the early phase of innovation journeys. In parallel, he teaches the discovery process in universities and business schools.
A cross-disciplinary designer, Paul designs experiences which embrace the societal issues emerging at the friction between new technologies, social demands and sustainable challenges. His approach combines design research, systemic thinking, co-design and prototyping to deliver detailed design grounded in industrial and societal reality. With a love of crafting meaningful and people-centred experiences, he often works at the intersection of the physical and digital landscape. He has worked to improve tech consumer-goods products and services, enables social innovation and disrupt the healthcare industry. He is skilled in industrial & development design, user experience, organizational change, circular thinking & sustainability. He works at Scania Group and is a co-organizer of Speculative Futures Stockholm.
Peter is the headmaster of a school in Spišský Hrhov, Slovakia. Peter was one of the first headmasters in Slovakia to introduce an inclusive school curriculum. He works as a senior expert for community programmes at Škola dokorán - Wide Open School, n.o. He has participated in many projects in the field of inclusive education and in the care and education of preschool children.
I'm a designer from Holland who loves to go on adventures! Currently located in Denmark to explore the Viking-lifestyle, where the morning-harbour-swims and kayak-sessions do me well.
Job Titles:
- Senior Change Manager at Ashoka
Experienced moderator, impact facilitator and coach. Senior Change Manager at Ashoka, where he focuses on accompanying Ashoka Fellows and other social innovators and socially beneficial initiatives on the way to collective impact and systemic changes. Studied law and international relations at Masaryk University in Brno, where he was also a launch Manager at Career. He used to work for the global organization Greenpeace as Fundraising Manager. Co-founded the startup Smitio, a platform enabling direct connections between employees and employers.
Job Titles:
- Advisor for Self - Organising
- Co - Founder of Loomio
One of the cofounders of Loomio, an open source software tool for collective decision-making. He's also a Catalyst at Enspiral: a network of self-organising companies who have been working without bosses since 2010. He's passionate about co-ownership, self-management, collaborative governance, and other ways of sneaking anarchism into respectable places. He writes at medium.com/@richdecibels
Job Titles:
- Advisor for Open Innovation Networks and Communities
- Expert
Roland Harwood is a compulsive connector of people and ideas. As a successful serial entrepreneur, he is currently Founder and Director of Liminal, a new venture currently in development. Prior to that he was Co-Founder and Managing Director at 100%Open, the multi award-winning open innovation agency that works with the likes of LEGO, Ford, UBS, Oxfam and in 25+ countries around the world to co-innovate with their partners.
Roman is a designer and the founder of Pábení.cz. He believes in the long-term sustainability of businesses and decision-making based on data, not assumptions. He works for commercial, public, and non-profit organizations, helping them change, embrace humanity and responsibility - both for their behavior and for the environment in which they operate.
Samu is an architect and urbanist. His areas of specialty are the overlaps of technology, creative industries and the built environment, the media history of architecture and innovation in the design practice. As a consultant and strategist he has organized and curated several programs, events and research projects. He is a regular speaker and course leader at universities internationally.
Latin soul got lost in the Nordics, secretly aspires to become a private detective using her dyslexic overhearing power. Prone to get stuck in questioning rabbit holes and earning headaches out of it. Cares about words. Obsessed with humans and making schemes.
Slavo is an expert on Corporate Innovation and Intrapreneurship. In the past, he gained experience by co-launching Innovation labs such as the SKODA AUTO DigiLab and its offices in Tel Aviv and Beijing. Slavo lived in 7 countries in the last 7 years and accumulated his experience from Real-Estate, Utilities, and Automotive. He is a Certified Design Sprint Master and founder of the Czechoslovak Service Design Community.
Job Titles:
- Advisor for Learning Programmes
- Head of Innovation Learning Programmes
As Head of Innovation Learning Programmes, Sonja is responsible for designing and delivering Nesta's Innovation Skills programmes for the public and community sectors. Her role involves ensuring a design-led innovation approach is applied across a range of initiatives in Nesta's skills and capacity building portfolio including the Creative Enterprise Programme, Evidence Masterclass and States of Change.
Stanislav is a Roma activist with many years of experience in promoting equal education rights for Roma children in Slovakia and internationally. He worked for the European Roma Rights Centre in Budapest and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Warsaw. He cooperated on several pieces of research and analytical reports on the state of education for the Open Society Foundations and until recently coordinated an international network of professionals working with the youngest Roma children Romani Early Years Network in the Netherlands. He currently works for a philanthropic company based in Vienna.
Tibor studied industrial design at Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. During that time he gained practical experiences at Beijing product innovation company PER, car design studio at Škoda - Mlada Boleslav, involved as well in multidisciplinary team in Odense, Integrated design programme. He has worked for three years in Branding and Retail Design consultancy 3070 Inc.
Job Titles:
- Founder at Studio Rygalik and Tre
Tomek is a designer, curator and educator with a Ph.D in Industrial Design, born in Lodz in 1976. He studied architecture at the Technical University of Lodz, and graduated in Industrial Design from the Pratt Institute (1999 BID). He then worked with design companies in the United States, consulting for international clients such as Kodak, Polaroid, MTV, PerkinElmer, Dentsply, Unilever, and Dupont. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2005 (MA), he joined the RCA staff as a Research Associate and established Studio Rygalik in both London and Lodz, Poland.
Tomi is a biologist from Hungary. He's been always interested in green area development: how to bring back nature to daily life, be it our work environment or our personal every day life. Green walls, community gardens, historical gardens, agroinnovation just to mention some fields of experience he's participated during the last years.
An innovator and mindfulness practitioner, Yang designs services and experiences informed by rigorous research, inspired through iterative prototypes and integrated via a collaborative approach. With unlimited curiosity about the complex humanity and imagination of the world from different perspectives, he has worked in industries from healthcare and logistics to agriculture. He is skilled in research, facilitation and rapid prototyping. Besides working as a design researcher, he also starts his company Studio Nwak designing for consciousness, intelligence, and being. He worked at H&M Group and did his internship at IDEO!
Job Titles:
- Service Designer
- Service Designer at More Than Metrics
Zsófia is a service designer at More than Metrics nestled in the heart of the Austrian Alps. She gained knowledge in the fields of design strategy and service design by doing consultant work for several industries and being a corporate in-house designer. She is passionate about non-formal education.
Zuzka is alumni of the leadership program Teach for Slovakia, she has cooperated with the Slovak Research Institute of Child Psychology and Pathopsychology and she is the founder of Naše školstvo - NGO that works on creating a development network of BBSK elementary schools.
Job Titles:
- Employee Inspiration Lead at Emarsys
My work is about PEOPLE: supporting them to become the best they can be. Helping organizations to have successful conversations around the way to great results: culture, talent, leadership, success, inclusion and letting go.