Our Team
We are a mission-driven collective of transition designers, systems thinkers, sustainability experts and researchers.
We are challenging the consultancy model by proactively imagining the projects and change the world urgently needs, and finding partners to bring them to life. We subvert the "business-as-usual" paradigm by building capacity, understanding and methods for accelerating transformational change.
Zeynep Falay von Flittner
Founder, Transition Designer
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Zeynep is an experienced design leader, entrepreneur, design consultant, and public speaker focusing on the role of creative and design practices in sustainability transitions. She is combining systems thinking, foresight, and human-centric design to develop new methods and approaches to support companies and networks to build new capabilities around sustainability transitions. Zeynep collaborates frequently with partners from academia and co-authors articles that integrate design practice-based learning with design research. She is the founder of Design Activists for Regenerative Futures, also the member of the board of System Change Finland.
View Zeynep’s website here.
Iines Reinikainen
Designer
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Iines is a designer for sustainability transitions, with a background in visual communication design and visual arts. Iines combines visual practices with sustainability knowledge, systems thinking, collaboration and participation design toward ecologically and socially just futures.
Iina Santamäki
Regenerative Facilitator & Consultant
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Iina (M.Sc.) is an entrepreneur and changemaker with a vision to support the transformation towards a fairer and more regenerative world. She has specialized in regenerative leadership and sustainability, facilitation and process design, and systems thinking and change processes. Along with nature rights, Iina is passionate about human rights and conflict resolution and has been studying and practicing deep democracy, a global, whole-system approach to facilitate conflicts, from 2021 onwards. As a facilitator, Iina enjoys creating safe spaces for people to show up as they are and be the bridge between different ways of knowing.
Savannah Vize
Regenerative Designer-Researcher
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Savannah is a regenerative designer-researcher with a background in visual design and place-based community engagement, and a master’s degree in Creative Sustainability. She uses collaborative and visual approaches to explore and communicate complex topics accessible and engaging ways. Touching on artistic, academic and activist modes, her work carries the theme of playful, imagination-centred and emotionally supportive creative practice in reaching for regenerative futures, using tools such as participatory research methods, co-design workshops, information architecture and service design approaches.
View Savannah’s portfolio here.
Inka Asikanius
Designer
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Inka is a visual designer who has her roots deep in strategic communications. She creates an information-oriented visual design with a strategic mindset. Her passion is to help organizations to crystallize and communicate about their sustainability journey and transition – and, to create meaningful design that has an impact.
View Inka’s website here.
İdİl Gazİulusoy
Advisor, Professor of Sustainable Design
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İdil is Professor of Sustainable Design at the Department of Design, Aalto University. She is a sustainability scientist and design researcher, developing a teaching and research portfolio for imagining sustainable, equitable and resilient future systems through various approaches in design research and developing interventions to achieve these proposals. İdil's work is concerned with socio-technical and socio-ecological systems with a particular focus on production-consumption systems and cities. She is a global pioneer in the emerging area of design for sustainability transitions, developing theories and methods/tools for design practice dealing with sustainability transitions.
Anni Rissanen
Advisor, Dance Artist & Educator
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Anni is the founder of Virgiinia - Centre for Embodiment in Helsinki. She is a dance artist (MA) and teacher (BA) specialized in the use of embodiment and somatics in her teaching. Rissanen has been working as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher in Finland and abroad for 15 years. She combines dance and visual arts in her work. Choreographies: Face-to-face (Tanssin Aika Festivaali 2018, Mänttä Art Festival 2021), Turning Point (Forum Box 2016), Landscapes (Forum Box 2014), Jälki minussa (2014), and Omakuvia (2012).
She graduated with a master's degree in dance from the Theatre Academy in 2008 and has worked as a dancer with, among others, Sari Palmgren, Soile Lahdenperä, Maija Mustonen, Kati Raatikainen, and Satu Herrala. Since 2009, she has taught at institutions such as the Helsinki City Theatre, Full Moon dance Festival, Tanssille ry, Theatre Academy, Zodiak - Centre for New Dance, Critical High School, Helsinki Art Hall.
Kirsi Hakio
Activator & Capacity Builder
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Kirsi is an expert and researcher in transformative creative practices and inner sustainability. Her background is in collaborative and empathic design, and inner shift work.
She is endlessly interested in the connection between inner and outer change, and how this affects the kind of future we are constantly co-creating together. Recently she has focused on exploring how this connectedness becomes visible in practice through the people and communities involved in various development projects.
Kirsi believes that when we change ourselves we change the world. In her work, she draws on awareness-based systems change methods and practices - including Theory U, Art of Hosting, Inner Development Goals, CoCreative Process Inquiry and Social Presencing Theater - that aim to create favourable conditions and hold space for new ways of being, collaborating and building paradigm-shifting prototypes in the world.
Sara D'Angelo
Designer
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Sara is a strategic designer impelled to act for the creation of a more grounded and intentional present. With a background in design research, service and speculative design, she believes that change is possible if a multidisciplinary effort is employed. Her interventions follow collaborative and inclusive ways of working that foster just and equitable transitions. Not only does she consider design as a tool for radical change, but she is also interested in awareness-based practices that use the body to uncover knowledge. Drawing from arts and academia, Sara’s work aims at re-inscribing design practices towards place-based narratives via engaging communities, multi-species and the locality. Furthermore, she is passionate about climate work, socio-ecological actions and futures. She approaches the work with a versatile design skillset comprising participatory approaches to change, visual communication, care and an omnipresent curiosity.
View Sara’s LinkedIn here.
Paul Mesarcik
Advisor, Strategic Designer
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Paul is a strategic designer and engineer. He has worked with startups, NGOs and agencies across Africa, Asia and Europe. He is fascinated by regenerative business, circularity and post-growth economies. Paul uses design to translate between disciplines, imagine just visions for the future, and co-create viable pathways.
Saaramaria Kuittinen
Writer and Creative Practitioner
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Saaramaria is a writer and creative practitioner. She believes we need to create spaces around meaning and develop our ability to hold uncertainty and the unknown. Creative writing, embodied practices and playfulness are in her tool box and she wants to investigate how to use arts and creativity for shared transcontextual processes and sensemaking.
Andrea Gilly
Strategic designer
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Andrea Gilly is designer, entrepreneur, consultant and gardener, with a vision of facilitating a transition to regenerative futures. Embracing iterative exploration of sustainable practices, they design strategies with clients wishing to find creative approaches to adapt regenerative ways of doing business. At the moment Andrea is exploring designerly ways of engaging in critical thinking. She explores how to create a change of narrative from a linear way of thinking, towards more regenerative and reflective ways to think of the future and our role in making it happen.
View Andrea’s website here.
Gaye Amus
Advisor, Environmental Educator
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Gaye is an environmental educator, consultant, TedX speaker, and founder of Learning In Nature Ltd. She is based in Helsinki, Finland and is currently training educators internationally, contributing in conferences as well as giving seminars on nature pedagogy and outdoor education. She has also been leading well-being days, giving consulting as well as professional support on sustainability to companies, organizations and public administration. As a general way of working these services take place primarily in the inspiring nature, which she sees as the most self-sustaining and regenerative system.
Coming from a background in engineering, child development and environmental education, she takes this interesting blend and brings a holistic approach to life. Gaye is a co-author of the book “Earth Care, People Care and Fair Share in Education: The Children in Permaculture Manual” (2018) and author of her recent book “Come Out and Play” (2022)
Erika Eva
Creative practitioner & facilitator
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Erika Eva is a physical theatre maker who is now fascinated about how to learn to hold complexities amidst the crisis using embodied practices. In order to respond to the metacrisis we need new skills, new ways to be and new ways to think. As an artist, she is used to going towards the new. As a movement professional, she sees a lot of potential in unleashing all the wisdom we hold in our bodies.
Our values
As a collective of change-makers, we are led by the values of the future, not by those governing the present.
These values build our collective’s relational infrastructure to nurture reciprocity, resilience and help us move together towards our common mission.
Our values align us, hold us accountable and ensure our work is always brave and ambitious.
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We define success by how positively impactful our projects are. Our work centres around creating impact at individual, organisational and systemic levels.
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We embody the power of joy, playfulness and creativity as a tool for transformation, to build a resilience that enables our work, whilst nurturing our wellbeing.
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We move beyond siloed and competitive models towards building transparency, multidisciplinary alliances and co-creation in our projects.
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We cultivate transformation, care and flourishing by mirroring the renewing flow of nature, who is both our collaborator and client.
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We catalyse new imaginaries by continuously questioning existing paradigms, challenging our ways of thinking, working and doing, and learning through experimentation.