Foundation We Are is a consulting design agency working together with experts to innovate. We use collaborative design in order to transform social and legal systems.
Specifically, Foundation We Are provides a platform that enables the collaboration between designers and decision-makers, and creates space to redesign societal and legal fields. The foundation fosters collaborative design techniques where expert knowledge cross-pollinates with creative thinking in order to generate innovative solutions.
Increasing poverty and inequality indicate that current societal and legal frameworks become insufficient. Laws and diplomacy can be approached as matters of design. In effect, society can be re-designed by making the complex - clear.
Working towards solutions can benefit by repositioning the problematics, in an analytical, critical, or even analogical manner. In this way, design reveals new trajectories for improvement that can result in topical small-scale interventions or even visualising systems or structures in a way that makes them understandable.
Overall, the combination of design thinking with expertise can generate proposals and projects that bring innovation at many societal scales: neighbourhood, city, country and trans-national institutions.
Design is not only about solving material or aesthetic problems. It is a way of thinking, a way of analysing, more importantly, it is a way of seeing the world. We need to see systems function differently, that is how designers will contribute to other disciplines.
Bernhard Lenger
Chairman & Founder
Bernhard is an Austrian award winning physical narrative and brand designer. He was a speaker at the EU Women Economic Forum 2017 and founded the `This is Ecocide` campaign and Foundation We Are.
Hannah van Luttervelt
Coordinator
Hannah is a Dutch game designer and the chairwomen of Sectie-C in Eindhoven. Her `Playing with Weapons` has been shown at the Milan Design Week 2017 and gained international attention.
Kornelia Dimitrova
Head of Research
Kornelia is a Bulgarian architect and designer. She was nominated for the Archiprix NL in 2016 and the Archiprix International in 2017 and is teaching at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal.
Maxime Benvenuto
Curator in Chief
Maxime is a French conceptual designer. He was nominated for the Social Design Talent Award 2016 and his `Ministry of Humanism` project has been exhibited in the SFSU Design Gallery - San Francisco (USA).
Lucandrea Baraldi
Narrative Curator
Lucandrea is an Italian experience designer. He has been assistant exhibition and experience designer at Daily Tous Les Jours for the exhibition Extra Fantômes, La Gaîté Lyrique.
Jella Lena van Eck
Visual Strategist
Jella is a Dutch concept designer and filmmaker. She has produced and directed several short films and was
a production assistant for a documentary on VICE International.
Daeun Lim
Illustrator in Chief
Daeun is a Korean illustrator
and textile designer. She is the founder of Studio Eemda in Rotterdam and had been a speaker at The Hague Talks at the Dutch Embassy in Vienna, in 2017.
Karen van Luttervelt
Graphic Designer
Karen is a Dutch graphic designer. She founded her graphic design studio in The Hague and has designed a versatile range of publications from children's books to scientific theses.
