Director of the Brussels-based design research company Strategic Design Scenarios, has 20 years of experience in strategic design, participative scenario building and new product-services system definition.

He is active in various fields and research projects from investigating Creative Communities for Sustainable Living in China, India, Brazil and Africa with UNEP to European research project investigating social innovation to support sustainable transition, exploring the future of innovation or building a deliberative platform on nanotech.

François is scientific director of the public innovation lab 27e Région in France and the co-ordinator of the DESIS Europe, the European branch of the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability network. He teaches strategic design at ENSCI Les Ateliers Paris, La Cambre, Brussels and Politecnico, Milan.

He organizes the Sustainable Everyday Project platform. This collection of scenarios and cases of social innovations asked: what might everyday life be like in a sustainable society? How would we eat food, move, work, and take care of each other?Last book on the subject: Collaborative Services, Social innovations and design for sustainability.

Marcelline Bonneau

Marcelline is experienced in managing EU and national projects of various scales, from large transversal consortia to small benchmarking studies. She has in particular developed experience in public policy studies, involving citizens and stakeholders in large virtual and physical consultations, in order to feed into the policy process through a variety of both “classical” and innovative methodological and data collection designs, in particular with the role of e-technologies, bottom-up and participatory approaches. She is used to working closely with experts in order to combine the academic expertise to the needs of policy work, translating and operationalising further policy conclusions and recommendations for action. These tools and approaches have been used for evaluations of public policies, impact assessments, as well as consumer market studies for the European Commission, providing both data collection and quantitative and qualitative in-depth general analysis with the illustration of concrete examples through cases studies.

In addition to her methodological expertise, she studied the role of cities in seeking to achieve various aims: for example the protection of biodiversity and environment resilience through green infrastructures, (Design, Implementation and Cost Elements of Green Infrastructure Projects, for DG ENV) and the creation of innovative projects (Collection of good practices for fostering innovation and creativity, for DG EAC).

Marcelline also tackled social innovation through various projects as a form of empowerment for DG EMPL (for example the Restructuring Forum devoted to innovative actions for projects under Article 6 of the ESF Regulation No 1784/1999 of 12 July 1999), as a transversal approach for DG EAC(Collection of good practices for fostering innovation and creativity) as well as for business creation and entrepreneurship  for DG ENTR (through the Interim evaluation of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (2007-2013)and the Interim Evaluation of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Programme).

She speaks French, English, Polish, Russian and has some knowledge of Italian.

Virginia Tassinari

She guests lectures for Politecnico di Milano (Product Service System Design Program), Institute Without Boundaries (Georgebrown University, Ontario) and many other international universities where she is asked to lecture in the field of design for social innovation, particularly in its relationship with theory and philosophy. Virginia is also an Executive Board member of Cumulus, the International Association of Universities and Colleges of Art, Design and Media, and member of the coordination group of DESIS network (International Network of design for social innovation & sustainabilityà. Virginia has also been working at the coordination of projects of design for social innovation in cities, as for instance Sustainability at School#3 (Interreg).

She is at this moment working at a project of urban regeneration in the cities of Liege and Seraing (Belgium), where where is setting up together with the local authorities a public innovation place and working to a more participatory way to co-design a master plan. Together with IWB (Tornoto) she has been working with the municipality of Dublin (co-design of services for the city with citizens and local stakeholders) and the city of Markham (Ontario). Virginia Tassinari also works on applying philosophical categories in the world of design through socially relevant design projects at the Mad Faculty in Belgium, where she is also the founder of a DESIS Lab within the research group Social Spaces. Within the international DESIS network – uniting schools and labs focussing on design for social innovation and sustainability – she assists in the collection and dissemination of international cases of social innovation through the DESIS Showcase format and feeds the discourse on the relationship between theory and practice of social innovation through the DESIS Philosophy Talks.