KISDtalk Double Feature: Mauro Rego and Femke Coops with Kristina Bogner

Kristina Bogner is an assistant professor at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainabel Development at University Utrecht. She is an interdisciplinary researcher and teacher enthusiastic about engaging in sustainability transitions. Her mission is to support transformative social innovation, peoples’ development, and impactful and responsible thinking and behavior. Her main research interests are sustainability transitions and transformations. She is currently focussing on questions around justice, emotions and transformative action, e.g. how we can engage with emotions in complex justice situations or how we can engage in transformative research and education. She is co-hosting the Special Interest Group on “Justice, Power and Transformative Action in Sustainability (JUPITA)“.

Femke Coops is an Industrial Design graduate from Eindhoven University of Technology and a Designer in Residence at the Design Impact Transition (DIT) Platform and the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions (DRIFT) in Rotterdam. She believes that design plays a pivotal role in addressing the challenges of our time. As design problems have never been clearly defined or easily solved, she believes designers can thrive within these complex environments: “We can create design spaces which offer opportunities, rather than getting stuck in the system, because of our ability to combine analysis and creation into synthesis. Analysis helps us to grasp complex societal challenges, learning how they are positioned within the bigger system and understanding how they came to be. By creating, design can make visible what is not, showing possibilities and making them tangible.”