If this year’s line-up of speakers – including Dave Hakkens, Joel Towers, Daniel Freitag, Guto Requena and Elena Reygadas – alone isn’t enough to seduce you to come to WDCD Live Amsterdam, here are a few more reasons.
1. Update your creative leadership skills
The times we live in demand new attitudes and competences from creative leaders. Design managers in companies and design agency leaders more and more have to shift their focus to using design and creativity for social and environmental change. At WDCD Live you’ll meet creative leaders from industry, education and agencies, including Google’s Robert Wong, Parsons School of Design dean Joel Towers and Pentagram’s Marina Willer, who will share their learnings on creative leadership in the current time.
2. Learn how to move communities
A great idea is one thing, having it embraced by enough people is the crucial factor to really bring about change. At WDCD Live you’ll hear inspiring stories from movers and shakers like Precious Plastic founder Dave Hakkens and Mark van Baal of Follow This who wants to change Shell from within with many small shareholders.
3. See how design makes impactful businesses
Business and economy have always been driving forces behind change, with both good and bad impact. At WDCD Live you will meet amazing examples of businesses that use design principles in their business strategies that combine social impact with business growth. Learn how Jaap Korteweg created meat alternatives that yield his company The Vegetarian Butcher €20 million turnover in 2018. Or hear from Daniel Freitag how an unconditional choice for sustainability can build an international design brand.
4. Discover new ways & new materials
Creativity is synonymous to new approaches, and unthought-of solutions. WDCD Live is all about this. Listen for instance to Brazilian architect Guto Requena who invented a beautifully poetic way to capture people’s emotions in tangible forms. Hear from textile artist Femke van Gemert how she gives new value to old garments. Or come to appreciate Mexican chef Elena Reygadas’ new views on haute cuisine.
5. Help define the schooling of the next generation OF game changers
WDCD Live is also a gathering for design educators and their students. Among the collaborating design schools is Design Academy Eindhoven that participates in a workshop on Designing with the consequences in mind, exploring how we can innovate more constructively. Or join the WDCD Academy Workshop in which Marco van Hout, Head of Programmes & Impact of The Digital Society School, will investigate together with representatives of leading design schools what knowledge, expertise and skills designers need to develop in order to be able to address the UN SDGs.