Collaborative Design Ageny
Co-founders: Maxime Benvenuto, Lucandrea Baraldi, Kornelia Dimitrova, Daeun Lim, Hannah van Luttervelt, Karen van Luttervelt, Jella van Eck

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.

