Border Sessions - Out of Chaos

The Border Sessions Out of Chaos edition is an in-person event in The Grey Space in the Middle in The Hague on Nov. 2. Doors open at 16:00.

Border Sessions is a social learning experience. We aim to unite a group of explorative people to learn from each other and build new partnerships for positive growth at the intersection of arts, technology, and science. We do this by offering a stage to people with a compelling mission to share their work and lessons learned and provide a safe open space to collide and connect. We present a variety of talks, workshops, and experiences throughout the year.

For every event we organise, we apply three simple rules:

- You are there from the beginning till the end to make sure others can benefit from your input

- You join with a curious and positive mindset

- We use a positive balance to actively support the pioneers in our community

Our upcoming event is on November 2. You should join if you are looking for a thoughtful space to learn and connect with like-minded people who aim for a more equitable and sustainable world for all species.

As an organisation, we are exploring the possibility of becoming a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation). We currently operate as a foundation, part of WorldStartup Collective.

You can join Border Sessions as a partner, providing you with a say in our programming, easy access to the events for your community, and a platform for your mission.

Timetable

Speakers:

As a sustainability manager at Fiction Factory, Marije Remigius is transforming the way interiors are designed and built. She collaborates with her clients and other stakeholders to take responsibility for the materials used in their products. She's also giving presentations and workshops to architects, students, and companies to help them make sustainable design choices. During her presentation you will learn how to build with sustainability in mind easy and efficient.

Society expects business to do better. But how likely is this, when the underlying structures still promote short-term profit extraction? Even for impact-driven startups, a traditional shareholder-owned structure is still the go-to route.

What if ownership would be redesigned? What if stewards, instead of absentee shareholders, would hold the steering wheel of a company? These and many other questions will be covered by Nina de Korte who co-founded We Are Stewards, a consulting firm that guides businesses in their transition to steward-ownership. Nina is connected to The Hague University of Applied Sciences as a guest lecturer in social entrepreneurship and innovation.

Barbara Gwanmesia is a Dutch-based social entrepreneur and writer who has spent decades helping Africans find better opportunities and wellbeing. Barbara is co-founding the first knowledge-streaming platform to make books, stories and learning accessible to Africans in all indigenous and official African languages. The team's intention is to cover all 2000+ indigenous languages and lingua francas of Africa.

In her presentation, she will talk about her vision and drive to impact the African social and intellectual landscape. She'll discuss how Batazia is breaking down barriers by making it easy for people with limited resources to exchange information.

Erika is from a small town in Japan called Susono. She spent a lot of her childhood with her great-grandmother Yao who made the family recipe of #miso from scratch. She studied film photography in Tokyo and then moved to London to study Marketing and Metaphysics. Her love of travelling led her to realize that food and travel create a strong connection.

In 2017, Erika moved to Rotterdam to establish a craft miso brewery WAKEAT. Through her work, she promotes #upcycling of food and the old Japanese wisdom of "Mottainai." She collaborates with local beer breweries and tofu makers to bring by-products back to the table.

Jeff van Dijk is an entrepreneur and devoted to create positive change. Design thinking and doing is his professional habitat and he is know for his catching energy and resourceful abilities in creative development.

Jeff is working for many years in the business jungle of leisure and advertising . All this experience is now in full use to contribute seriously to the circular economy. He is not afraid of radical change and he is at his best in taking up against what is common but not right. He will talk about LocalDutch, a new, game-changing, sales concept for locally produced healthy food. Going beyond organic. Great taste. Zero food miles, no waste.

Marjanne Cuypers-Henderson completed a master's degree in design engineering at Delft University of Technology. Her goal is to build a healthy future for both humans and the planet by combining green technology with design in harmony with natural systems. She will talk about BlueBlocks’ mission to build and foster a healthy future for both humans and the planet by combining green technology with design in harmony with natural systems.

BlueBlocks is located in BlueCity, the example city of the circular economy, where Marjanne since then experiments and designs with fully bio-based materials. Residual streams from the agro-food sector and other natural resources are used as raw materials for bioplastics, vegan leather and natural composite materials. The most recent material development is SeaWood Materials, a series of sustainable seaweed composites meant for the built environment. SeaWood Materials is applied in a bio-based built house ‘The Exploded View Beyond Building’, firstly shown at Dutch Design Week ’21 and now a travelling installation.

Kuang-Yi Ku is from Taiwan and is doing his Ph.D. research at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He has graduated with triple master's degrees in social design from Design Academy Eindhoven, dentistry from National Yang-Ming University, and communication design from Shih Chien University. He is a former dentist, bio-artist, and speculative designer. His works often deal with the human body, sexuality, interspecies interaction, and medical technology.

He won the Gijs Bakker Award 2018 for his project, "Tiger Penis Project", which involved body modification, gender studies, and dentistry. His works were featured in international media such as New Scientist, The Huffington Post, and more.

Yoshinari Nishiki is essentially a barefoot practitioner who only spent a year in formal education in his entire adulthood. He made a web app in which money was circulated by people dropping and picking up digital coins on the street (before Pokémon GO). This project took Nishiki to Rotterdam, at a summer residency at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media during which he connected his coins with free ice creams in the city. Since the pandemic, Nishiki started his own artist-in-residence programme funded by the Embassy of the Netherlands.

In 1995, Jun Yamadera founded Eyes, Japan, the first IT startup from the University of Aizu, Fukushima. He has worked on various cutting edge projects, such as exporting rice from Fukushima, making the world's first virtual pottery system, making CG of historical archives of Japanese castles, temples, traditional dances and medical motions using motion capture. He is a pioneer in Augmented Reality wearable technologies, Medical x IT and has been organizing the world's first medical security hackathon since 2012.

His team won the championship in Developers Challenge 2013 Health 2.0 in Silicon Valley. He is the Health 2.0 Fukushima Chapter Leader, a TEDxKobe 2015 Speaker and an OWASP Fukushima Chapter leader. He started a project called “FUKUSHIMA Wheel” in the aftermath of the terrible disaster caused by the earthquake and nuclear accident in Fukushima, JAPAN on March 11, 2011.

Matt Barnaby is a Brexit escapee now living safely in The Netherlands. He is an unshakable believer in the need for meaningful connection and collaboration to tackle the messy problems out there in the world. So for social purpose-driven teams who face complex challenges, he creates and facilitates the space for those conversations to happen and turn into actions so that change happens. He does this in the worlds of renewable energy, transport, policy, social care, mental health and digitisation with organisations such as UN, UNICEF, OECD, REN21 and Government organisations all over the world.

In his session he will run a small un-conference within a conference. So if you have something you'd like to share, discuss, gather the thoughts of others then come along, pitch your suggestion and we'll self organise to make things happen.

James White is a former US Navy Helicopter pilot with extensive defence experience running complex acquisition projects for NATO. Building on his experiences in NATO, James is now launching DecisionHall with the objective of helping organizations accelerate, reduce the cost, and de-risk complex climate resilience and sustainability projects.

The most important “product” of senior leaders is decisions, and yet the vast majority of leaders rely purely on “gut feeling” to make many of their most important decisions. Decisions lie at the heart of every organization, and it can be surprising how little we understand about what a decision is and how decisions are made. In this workshop, we will explore different types of decisions, and introduce you to tools and techniques developed by the European Space Agency that are used to make key decisions about the design and operation of their most complex space missions.

Frans Taminiau is one of the founders of Unibrick. He will talk about how plastic waste will solve the global housing deficit. Unibrick is a building block for affordable housing made of plastic waste. For now the main focus area is developing countries where Unibrick helps to build stable and strong constructions that are cheaper than comparable constructions. By using local plastic in production facilities run by local franchisees the communities have a triple benefit: better housing, cleaning up plastic waste and having the economic benefits of the process landing in their community.

Tomo Kihara works at the intersection of play, technology, and society, as an artist, designer, and developer. He creates playful interventions and toys for thought that provide a new perspective to complex socio-technical problems in an engaging manner. He holds an MSc in interaction design from TU Delft (NL) and has worked and collaborated with organizations like Waag, and Mozilla Foundation on several design projects. His projects have been exhibited at places like the Ars Electronica and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

Dr. Nobuyuki Shirakawa researches innovation management and data-driven science.

Prior to his current position, as a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Science and Technology Policy, he promoted international research cooperation in technology foresight across all scientific disciplines and geographic regions. His work has established and expanded international relationships for Science and Technology Foresight.

Dr. Shirakawa also served at the New Energy and Technology Development Organization (NEDO), and Hiroshima Prefectural Government. At NEDO, drawing from his experience, he established a new institute at NEDO to develop research capabilities in technology foresight and its evaluation. At Hiroshima, he engaged in science and technology promotion across all scientific disciplines from agricultural extension to high-tech industries.

Based on his expertise, he acts as a technology/social entrepreneur. He is a co-founder and fellow of the Code for Japan. He is at the center of the network in Digital Government and CivicTech.