Speakers
Get ready to hear from leading design, business and sustainability visionaries from around the world, exploring design-led solutions to today’s biggest challenges.
Keep checking back as we'll be adding many more soon.
Get ready to hear from leading design, business and sustainability visionaries from around the world, exploring design-led solutions to today’s biggest challenges.
Keep checking back as we'll be adding many more soon.
Bas van Abel is an entrepreneur and designer with over 20 years of experience in social innovation. Passionate about transforming the economic system through a design-driven approach, he believes that businesses play a crucial role in driving the transition toward a more sustainable economy. As a designer, Bas explores the invisible complexities of production systems, uncovering hidden challenges and bringing them to light. Through his companies, he demonstrates that alternative, more sustainable ways of doing business are not only possible but essential for meaningful change.
Bas is the founder of the most sustainable and ethical smartphone in the world, Fairphone (fairphone.com) and Co-founder of circular startup De Clique (declique.com).
He advises companies in their sustainability transition, co-authored the book “Open Design Now” and is an Ashoka fellow, a network of the world's most prominent social entrepreneurs.
His work has earned him global recognition, including being named Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the World Economic Forum and receiving the Global Economy Prize. Fairphone has been recognised for its groundbreaking impact, featuring in Time’s Best Inventions (2020 & 2022) and receiving the United Nations Momentum of Change Award, presented by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. It was also named the most sustainable consumer electronics company in the world by Greenpeace and has won multiple design awards, including winner Product Design at the New York Design Awards, and voted the Coolest Dutch Brand amongst countless others.
Charlot is a 2022 Earthshot Prize Winner! Orphaned at the age of 10, she grew up in Mukuru, one of the biggest slums in Nairobi, and became a mother at age 16. Charlot was moved to provide safer cooking technologies for her community when her daughter got burned by a traditional stove and has dedicated her time, skills, and experience fighting household air
pollution, Energy poverty and Malaria. Her organization, Mukuru Clean Stoves, has manufactured and distributed over 550,000 life saving cookstoves, impacting the lives of 2.7 million Africans living in poverty and just launched the first in the world, patent pending, mosquito repellent fuel.
She has been recognized and awarded by Global Citizen, World Bank, United Nations. She is one of the 100 most influential Young Africans and was named a Forbes Sustainability Leader and Independent Climate 100 in 2024. Charlot is an Echoing Green Fellow, Schmidt Futures Fellow, Africa Business Hero, Global Good Fund Fellow, Stanford Global Energy Hero, Cartier Fellow, Forbes under 30 lister, Forbes Africa Youth Icon, One young World Entrepreneur of the year, Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awardee and a Bloomberg New Economy Catalyst. She sits on the board of three international funds and William, the Prince of Wales proudly calls her the queen of Africa!
Indy is co-founder of Dark Matter Labs and of the RIBA award winning architecture and urban practice Architecture00. He is also a founding director of Open Systems Lab, seeded WikiHouse (open source housing) and Open Desk (open source furniture company).
Indy is a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub, the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization. He is on the advisory board for the Future Observatory and is part of the committee for the London Festival of Architecture. He is also a fellow of the London Interdisciplinary School.
Indy was 2016-17 Graham Willis Visiting Professorship at Sheffield University. He was Studio Master at the Architectural Association - 2019-2020, UNDP Innovation Facility Advisory Board Member 2016-20 and RIBA Trustee 2017-20.
He has taught & lectured at various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School. He is currently a professor at RMIT University.
He was awarded the London Design Medal for Innovation in 2022 and an MBE for Services to Architecture in 2023.
Leland is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of COLLINS, the transformation consultancy honored as “Firm of the Year” 5 times in the last 5 years by AdAge and the D&AD. Between 2016 and 2021, Leland stepped away from his day-to-day duties at COLLINS to lead Chobani, then a regional American yogurt manufacturer, as its first Chief Creative Officer and, eventually, Chief Brand Officer. In those five years, he was part of a small executive team that 10x’d the company’s valuation, transforming the single-product yogurt maker into an international iconoclast brand. At Chobani, he built Ad-Age’s “2018 In-House Agency of the Year” and won top honors from major global award shows such as D&AD, Cannes, The One Show, among others. During his five years of leadership, Chobani topped Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies in the World” list five times – something not achieved by the manufacturer before or after his tenure. He has earned recognition from the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader, from IBM as “Design Thinking Leader,” from Ad Age as a “Young Influencer” and from the Association Of National Advertisers as a “Master of Marketing.
Leyla Acaroglu (PhD) is a leading sustainability strategist and provocateur – an expert on life cycle and systems thinking in design, production and consumption. Named Champion of the Earth by the UNEP in 2016, she is a designer, sociologist, educator and passionate proponent of sustainability in and through design. Leyla is also a well-respected international speaker, with over 1 million views on her TED talk. She developed the Disruptive Design Method for activating change, founded the UnSchool of Disruptive Design as well as the creative agency Disrupt Design, and created the rural regeneration, CO Project Farm in Portugal. Her award-winning designs and cerebrally-activating experiences, gamified toolkits, and unique educational experiences help people around the world to challenge the status quo and make positive social and environmental change.
Mariana Mazzucato (PhD) is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), where she is Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose. She is winner of international prizes including the Grande Ufficiale Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 2021, Italy's highest civilian honour, the 2020 John von Neumann Award, the 2019 All European Academies Madame de Staël Prize for Cultural Values, and 2018 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. She is a member of the UK Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) and the Italian Academy of Sciences Lincei. Most recently, Pope Francis appointed her to the Pontifical Academy for Life for bringing ‘more humanity’ to the world.
As well as The Entrepreneurial State: debunking public vs. private sector myths (2013), she is the author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy (2018), Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism (2021), and most recently The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies (2023). She advises policymakers around the world on innovation-led inclusive and sustainable growth. Her roles have included for example Chair of the World Health Organization's Council on the Economics of Health for All, Co-Chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, a member of the South African President’s Economic Advisory Council, and the Co-Chair of the Group of Experts to the G20 Task Force for the Global Mobilization against Climate Change.
Thomas Heatherwick is one of the world’s most inventive and celebrated designers, whose work is characterised by its originality, diversity and humanity.
His studio was founded in 1994 to bring together architecture, urban planning, product design and interiors into a single creative workspace. It is now an extraordinary organisation with 10 partners and 250 people dedicated to making the physical world that surrounds us more joyful and engaging.
Some of the studio’s designs include the 2012 Olympic Cauldron; Coal Drops Yard in King’s Cross; Google’s first ground-up campus in California; Little Island, a park set over the Hudson River in New York; the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town; and Azabudai Hills, a new neighbourhood in Tokyo.
From their studios in London and Shanghai, the team is currently working on over 30 projects in ten countries, including Seoul’s Nodeul Island; London Olympia; the new Changi Airport Terminal 5 with KPF; and MixC, the new district for Xian in China.
Thomas is a global advocate for human-centred architecture, campaigning against soulless new buildings, and calling for more interesting cities that put the public first. These ideas are captured in his bestselling book ‘Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World’, published worldwide in multiple languages and editions.
Thomas and his team also run one of the largest educational programmes of any single art or design company, inspiring young people aged 10-14 to see themselves as creative.
Thomas has been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Royal Academician and in 2004 became the youngest Royal Designer for Industry.