2009 Speakers

Janine Cahill

Janine Cahill BA MCom CPA is a Sydney-based innovation strategy and futures consultant with special expertise in developing experiential innovation leadership programs and working with deep forms of learning. She has worked in strategy, organizational change and leadership since 1988.

She also initiated environmental projects within a large bank in 1991, developing cost-benefit analyses of green projects, which made sustainability a business issue.

Her corporate Foresight and Innovation clients include nab and AMP, and she mentors a number of youth organisations. She also runs a monthly series of Foresight Innovation and Sustainability Hothouses (FISH@6) and is launching a new experiential and incidental learning business in the next few months.

Janine has developed strategy and implementation programs at corporate and business-unit levels. She won an Australian national award for strategy in 1990 and has been involved in change management of technology, process and culture changes over many years, following an early career in consumer, commercial and corporate finance.

Janine has her own creative and innovation practices. Working in the innovation space where futures, business, technology, design, sustainability and art converge, Janine is collaborating globally on a number of projects for the purpose of deepening the experience of the future today.

Janine co-creates Live Futures 2020: This year Future Journeys and Global Youth Futures have collaborated with COFA @ UNSW (College of Fine Arts at Paddington) to create Live Futures 2020: A World of Convergence.

www.futurejourneys.com

www.globalyouthfutures.org

Bill Hollins

Dr Bill Hollins undertakes consultancy for Direction Consultants that he started with his wife in 1985 after twenty years designing and managing design in industry. He has a doctorate in Design Management from Strathclyde University and now specialises in Service design. He has been actively involved in British Standards on design management and the UK Design Council website on Service Design. He had the first book on service design management published in 1991 and his fifth book was published in 2006. He has over 120 other publications.

Bill and also teaches at various universities and has worked in twenty five countries.

www.directionconsultants.co.uk

Ben Shepherd

Ben Shepherd is researching Food Security with the Centre for International Security Studies in the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Sydney.

Ben’s focus on Food Security stems from the intersection of three divergent interest: Firstly, his humanitarian concern regarding the inequity of food distribution. Secondly, his fascination with the politics and strategic machinations of international security stimulated by more than a decade of negotiating and implementing substantial projects for Australian-developed, high-technology cryptographic security solutions with foreign governments, militaries and financial institutions, including central banks. And thirdly, a deep curiosity around the role of corporations in the capitalist global economy as both agents of causation and agents of salvation for large scale social, political and economic issues. Ben has done business in, or with, countries ranging from eastern and western Europe, to North & South America, the Middle East and parts of Asia. Ben also practiced for a number of years as an industrial designer where he developed his capacity for innovative problem solving and for viewing solutions from multiple perspectives.

Ben’s current research program with C.I.S.S. is in the area of the geo-politics and security ramifications of national food security policies. Ben hopes that the outcomes of his research will provide not only a resource to inform policy making around international food security issues, but highlight opportunities of both strategic and corporate nature that deliver humanitarian outcomes.

Selena Griffith

Selena Griffith is an experienced designer and academic with specific interests in design management and practice and sustainability. Her research explores the relationships between designing, managing design and making meaningful change to effect sustainable practice. She is a senior lecturer in the School of Design Studies at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW. Selena is involved in coordinating Live Futures 2020: A world of convergence. She was attracted to the project by her firm belief that all disciplines must work together to secure a positive future.

Deborah Kneeshaw

Deborah has over two decades experience in the design industry, including 15 years at the heart of the London design scene, creating innovative graphics for blue chip clients.

Over the past 5 years Deborah has pioneered the use of design thinking as a tool for positive change in Australia. Her corporate training programs enable leaders to ignite their creative genius, and use design practise and principles to co-create visionary solutions with their teams. The practical tools gathered in her workshops translate into enlightened breakthroughs, new products, improved systems and services, and creative workplaces.

A former visiting lecturer with London University of the Arts, Deborah currently teaches at The Design Centre, and runs a 3-day program on creative strategic thinking with the Australian Graduate School Management.

http://www.designthinking.com.au

Josh Bladwell

Industrial Designer (B. Ides UNSW) specialising in interaction design and ergonomics, particularly as they relate to systems design.

Tom Kendall

Tom Kendall is a producer and director, best known for his work with OTW (Of The World TV) as a pioneer of the broadband video industry over the last decade. More about Tom at http://tomkendall.net.

Tom Kendall is presenting in the Film Space 2.00pm – 2.45pm:
Tom’s presentation at Live Futures 2020 is entitled “A Brief History of Now”, and covers some of the technological developments, critical public decisions and emerging societal sentiments of our recent past, that may surprisingly influence our future.

Simone Francis

Simone Francis has had experience in over seventy companies and organisations within various industries world-wide and has completed more than twenty varying courses. She is focused on providing creative communication and media to first world nations about the necessity for economic improvements for non-profit organisations and individuals helping in the areas of animal welfare, human rights, and environmental conservation throughout third world and developing countries, with minimal impact on culture.

In 2007, after completing a Communications and Media course and working as an intern for ‘The International Federation of Journalists’, Simone decided to combine her dreams and passions, and try to make a positive difference in the world. She realised that her love of travel, creativity, and adventure could be turned to fulfilling work and at the same time allow her to help people, animals and the environment.

Simone believes that by sharing her creativity and inspiring life experiences with others, especially the youth of Australia, she can positively influence people to change the world for the better.

Dominique Jaurola

Hunome Founder and CEO

Dominique is deeply committed to a better future, in particular through understanding the human condition; our dreams, silliness, and how to weave it into important contexts, into the minds and souls of decision makers. Her roles over the last 20 years as intrapreneur; in-house futurist, change agent and executive in the rapidly changing high technology industry have allowed her to work in and on the key decision-making processes. Her entrepreneurial experience allows her to build businesses, which leverage the understanding of the future for better decisions in product, design, marketing and strategy. As an infopreneur; speaker, author, facilitator and mentor she is able to share her experiences and expertise with various audiences.

This journey and passion is demonstrated in her actions as an early leader in putting social sciences and future consumer thinking on to the corporate agenda when she was the global product marketing lead in 1994 at Nokia. Her actions made a difference through looking into the eyes of the beholder in a different way. She initiated and led in mid 90s at Nokia a strategic program to shift Nokia’s understanding of the future consumer. Within that role she developed many new approaches to understand people and translated those views to meaningful strategies and product concepts, connecting people. In 1998 she initiated and led at Nokia a vision program on “Mobile Information Society 2010”, as she says, many of its recommendations are emerging on the market. She has written on these topics and co-authored and contributed to books and reports: “Strategic Foresight – The Power of Standing in the Future”, “Thinking about the Future” and “Connected World – Redefining the Geography of Business and how we Work and Play”.

In 2008 she founded Hunome, the culmination of her pathways and a company set to transform human understanding of itself, providing a dynamic and visually engaging environment on the net where to share and draw ‘what makes us tick’ insights and understanding for many professional, intellectual and personal needs.

Her wish to progress the meaningful thinking about our predicament and our potential is evident also in her other activities. She is a founding member and for three years was a member of the board of the Association of Professional Futurists. She initiated and co-led the establishment of AusForesight, an event bringing futurists together. She is an advisory board member, of Genesis Campus,an early stage venture capital fund based in the US, as well as in the University of Houston Futures Studies program. She was invited, as a transformation-oriented visionary with a unique perspective to The Future Shapers Institute, ”a think tank formed to challenge widely-accepted assumptions which underlie common human belief systems that present global society from advancing toward a future of environment sustainability, social justice and global harmony”.

@dojau
www.hunome.com [launch 2009]

Vaibhav Purohit

Vaibhav Purohit has Worked as an Architect, Project Coordinator and a 3D Artist in Multinational companies at varied positions. He is also strategically involved in Research in Greening of Existing Building Stock of Australia and plans to complete it as a Research Thesis at some point of time.

Vaibhav enjoys developing virtual 3D environment, Design and Utopia. He likes to study post modern Architecture in my free time and am a great follower of principles and concepts of Zaha Hadid, Santiago Calatrava, Norman Foster and Xavier Pioz for his Bionic ideas.

He worships sustainability and wishes to contribute something for sustenance of sustainability.

Nerida Lennon

Nerida struggles to tell people exactly what it is that she does because she has such diverse interests, and thus, fingers in many different pies. She holds an Honours degree in Psychology and Sociology, where her thesis looked at social networking sites.

She works as a research assistant on a project looking at young women’s financial literacy and recently became the Research Director at Project Australia: a free, online incubator for social innovation. She is also involved with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition trying to spread the word about the effects of climate change.

In addition, she is co-facilitating Global Youth Futures Dreaming workshops with Janine Cahill, which is the reason why she has traveled from Melbourne to the festival. Nerida has a natural tendency to look towards the future, is a glass half full person and her current interests include: youth; popular culture; strategic foresight; online social media; and meditation.

Tirrania Suhood, Ralph Holwerda and Viviane Batchelor

Tirrania Suhood, 2020 Summit attendee and Manager, Ralph Holwerda and Viviane Batchelor, both alcohol and other drug counselors and community cultural development workers. We are all from Bridges Inc., www.bridges.org.au, and are active in the development of networks and meaningful, inspiring relationships, that link local with the big picture.

Justin Medcalf

Justin is the founder of GEM Advisers, a Sydney-based responsible investing advisory firm. Justin is devoted to every area of sustainability; with an aim to excite, inspire and enable everyday individuals, of all shades of Green, to get involved in our prosperous, sustainable future.
Justin is also a Fellow at the Centre for Sustainability Leadership (www.csl.org.au).

Fang Xu (Associate Professor)

Fang’s research interests drew from his multi-discipline practice in the design industry and benefited from his cross-cultural experience.

In his teaching area, his research interest is on the relationship between culture, design process and design methodology. The research examines the influence of cultural manifestation in arts & design education in both Australian and Asian Universities. It also investigates the integrated-disciplinary approach in design education to respond to the increasingly hybrid nature of the design profession in the real world.

In his practice area, he concentrates on the field of urban public spaces-urban streets as the major research motif. It investigates the diverse features and multi-layer meanings of urban streets in a broader historical and cultural context. To create and maintain the richness of street culture and life in the constantly renewed urban pattern, it explores the possibility of using urban open space structures as a strategy of urbanization. By examining the relations between human behaviours and built environments in the process of urbanization, the research is both theoretical and practical for fast urbanizing environments in South East Asia, particular in China.