Told is a small, isolated village in Eastern Hungary where the majority of the population lives in poverty. Our partner, the Real Pearl Foundation, has been working since 1999 for equal opportunities and social integration for the poor in this region.
One basic element of their strategy is to encourage the community to become more sustainable through self-efficacy. They support community members who have little access to knowledge about opportunities by teaching them about the resources that are available to them.
Part of this activity is running a wood workshop. The tools were a gift from a carpenter and through some grant funding the workshop was developed further. The biggest challenge for the wood workshop at the moment is the lack of products that would make it financially sustainable.
Holis has partnered with the Real Pearl foundation to help them develop wood products as well as a competitive business model, marketing plan, and sales channels. We are looking for participants including, but not limited to, the following areas:
Visual communication
Industrial & 2-3D designer (Poland)
Nutrition Educator
Author, Interaction Designer
Alexandra is an interaction designer, product designer, entrepreneur based in London. She was named 1st in a list of 100 Internet of Things Influencers (Postscapes, 2016), 2nd in Top 100 Internet of Things Thought Leaders (Onalytica, 2014) and in the Top 100 Influential Tech Women on Twitter (Business Insider, 2014), Smith & Williamson Power 100 (2017).
Consultant, project manager
Alvaro is mathematician and project manager with experience in small and large companies. His problem-solving oriented mind makes him always look for continuous improvement. He is passionate about service design, and thinks it is the key to make the world a better place to live.
Service Design
Digital Marketing professional with 10+ years experience in SEO and SMM with a focus on international markets. Three years of experience working on special projects completed using Design Thinking methods and processes. Currently completing my degree in Service Design at SCAD.
Furniture designer
Amira is a designer, an entrepreneur and a researcher who is passionate about using her design skills to catalyze change. She’s triggered by problems, world potentials and solution hunting while believing in innovation, creative thinking and story telling as a lens.
Co-founder and Director of Superflux
Anab is a designer, futurist, filmmaker and educator. As Co-founder and Director of Superflux, she hopes to realise the vision of the Studio as a new kind of design practice, responsive to the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century. She has received awards from ICSID, UNESCO, Geneva Human Rights Festival, Apple Computers Inc., and the UK Government’s Innovation Department.
Business analyst
Singer
Programme Manager at Prime Minister's Office
E-commerce entrepreneur
E-commerce entrepreneur with a background in finance.
Ecology
Theology
Account manager at Mito
Preservation of Cultural and Architectural Heritage
UX Designer
Anna is a designer in UX, information and graphic design. She likes to observe and research topics connected with society, city and environment. She is passionate about design theory in Central Europe and Slovakia. She likes complex and meaningful projects where she can help to analyse, ideate and use visualisation to understand problems. Currently working as freelancer on projects in Slovak culture, design and environment. She co-works with strategic design and innovation company Stride XL in the Czech Republic.
User experience researcher, design strategist & speaker
User experience researcher, design strategist, speaker, podcaster, coach, facilitator, and community wrangler. You name it they have done it. And that too all over the world. Their journey into user experience (UX) began in architecture and industrial design at Pratt Institute and Savannah College of Art and Design respectively. Further gaining expertise in #usercentereddesign, #fintech, and #strategic + #futuresthinking through their role as User Researcher at GE Transportation, a Wabtec company in Atlanta and their current role leading the UX team at Capgemini in London. Outside work, they enjoy building diverse and inclusive communities and organizing design events/conferences for The Design Futures Initiative. They help these enterprises and communities to shape their future using strategic visioning tools.
Attila is associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest, Institute of Marketing and Media, Department of Marketing, Media and Designcommunication and founder of coandco.cc. He is a designer artist, with his company coandco.cc holds several international design awards such as Red Dot. Attila is the author of designcommunication, DIS.CO, complex creative design methodology.
Architect at Paradigma Ariadné
Architect
Program Lead & Social Innovator
Expert on sustainability, grassroots leadership, human-centred and social innovation. Avinash is an award-winning grassroots youth leader with a focus on environmental sustainability. Back in India, He worked with over 5000+ volunteers and 100+ full-time employees as the CEO of Waste Warriors Society - a grassroots nonprofit providing waste management solutions to communities living in eco-sensitive zones of the Himalayan region. Currently, Avinash is a master's student of Public Management at the University of Potsdam as a Helmut Schmidt Scholarship holder by DAAD. Further, he practices Design Thinking at Hasso Plattner Institute Germany. He can be found running, cycling, or climbing when not debating on environmental issues.
Freelancer designer. Previously head of the MOME Department of Design, co-founder of Sausagefence! design studio, designer of the iconic Hungarian Mustache Ba, P-shaped Bike Parkers and BKV Passenger Information System Designer.
Barbara is an assistant professor, theoretician, designer, author, and Design for Europe Ambassador. Co-founder and leader of the department of design theory at the Pekinpah Association, and director of the Ljubljana Institute of Design, an academic research organisation. Since 2010, with Petra Černe Oven, she has been co-editing Zbirka 42, a series of books on design, under the auspices of the Pekinpah Association.
Business Development Director & Brand Specialist
Curious and creative. Beatriz is passionate about the power of stories and communities to create kinder and happier societies. She helps organizations and individuals design social innovation projects and communication strategies as a consultant, mentor, and facilitator. She is the co-founder of WeThe Root and The Root Lab.
Philosophy
Event manager
Architect
Art history
Mathematical Modeller at Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Communication and PR
Product design
Associate lecturer at Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
Cansu is an early stage investor for tech for good companies. As senior partner, her focus at BGV is building meaningful partnerships for their portfolio teams and the fund itself. She also supports fundraising efforts for their investment vehicles. She has been involved with early stage ventures as founder, operator, mentor and now investor throughout her career in tech.
Service Designer
Architectural designer
Industrial, Product Design
I graduated from the ALUO, in the course of industrial design, and continued studying the master's degree in the stage design/scenography at AGRFT. Currently I am crafting scenes for theater and film. I enjoy music and basketball.
Dana is an interdisciplinary artist working between the boundaries of art and design, with a focus on social and climate justice. Amongst others, her participatory projects have been presented at Tate Modern, Museum of London, and London Short Film Festival (UK), Incheon Art Platform (South Korea), Centre for Art on Migration Politics (CAMP), Tanzhaus NRW (Germany), La Virgule (France), and Tranzit (Romania).
Artist, Freelance Graphic Designer
Daniel is a Budapest based graphic designer who graduated from the Royal College of Art, London. He is the co-founder of Diaméter Collective.
UI/UX Designer
Design thinker & Human experience designer
A passionate designer who thrives on understanding the relationship and interaction between humans and objects, specifically technological objects. I am visionary, always looking towards the future and thinking of alternative futures with no creative limits. I have a broad design skillset with experience ranging in product and furniture design, graphic design, website design and interior design using the design thinking process throughout.
Project Manager
Diana is a research-driven photographer with a deep interest in questions of identity, movement, and the human relationship to environment. She is passionate about interdisciplinary research, collaboration, working in diverse contexts, learning new things, and travelling. Besides photography, her professional experience includes communications in the non-governmental and institutional sectors, most prominently focusing on the Eastern Partnership and MENA regions.
Professor & Researcher
Designer, professor & researcher, he explores the relationship between design and education through play. His most relevant publications include one book, ‘Innovación social y diseño’, articles in different specialized magazines, and one game: the FUTURŒSCOPIO, a multimedia didactic experience to facilitate prospective thinking. He is currently studying a doctoral programme in Contemporary Studies at Coimbra University, in Portugal.
Professor at National Autonomous University of Mexico
Professor, researcher and designer, his work portrays the interest to understand the link between creativity and education. With a special curiosity for the interpersonal dynamics elicited by certain objects - like games and other playful artifacts - Diego explores complex social systems through collaborative design. His ideas have been constructed, exposed and debated in different formats from Mexico to Germany.
Industrial Design/ Speculative Design
Dominika is a designer, researcher and social innovator based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She works at the intersection of social design and environmental transitions, focusing on creating balanced connections between human-made and natural systems. User experience researcher passionate about psychology. Explorer, looking for connections between the urban and rural tomorrows.
UX Designer
Chef, plant-based cuisine enthusiast & promoter
Out of her passion for cooking, she abandoned her career in the film industry. She draws inspiration from her travels and sentiments to develop recipes full of distinct flavours. She can make anything into a sandwich and will convince the most prominent sceptics to eat tofu. Simple seasonal ingredients and cooking joy— the secret combination she applies to every meal. She runs workshops and authorises numerous articles and ebooks published with RoślinnieJemy. Daily, she shares her recipes on Instagram -> @domtargosz (we highly recommend checking this!).
Head of the Kindergarten Club at the Real Pearl Foundation's "tanoda" program
Dorottya works as a teacher, mentor and communication specialist for non-governmental organizations working for Roma inclusion and equal opportunities in Hungary. Her main areas of expertise are reading motivation, mother tongue development, she currently works mainly with the 3-4- year-old age group. She strongly believes that the for-profit and non-profit sectors could learn a lot from each other.
Social designer & Design strategist
Dr Bori Fehér is a social designer and design strategist focused on resilience and sustainability. Bori heads the Social Design Hub at MOME Innovation Center (MOME Interaction Design - Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest). She has facilitated students and researchers in social, eco and humanitarian design practice-based research projects for over a decade. Her research focuses on the climate crisis and its relations to social resilience, particularly on underprivileged communities and organisations on the rural periphery. She is the Co-Chair of the International Social Design Network she co-founded in 2020. Since 2014 Bori has been a Visiting Scholar at the Maryland Institute College of Art Center for Social Design in Baltimore, USA. She has a background in architecture and previously practised it in New York, USA.
Architect at Paradigma Ariadné
Architect, writer, critic and co-founder of paradigma:ariadné. He studied architecture at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and at the West Hungarian University. He is a former president of Budapest Architecture Student Studio and author of dozen essays, studies and articles in the topic of architecture, urbanism and politics. In his architecture related works he always collaborate with artist, designers and urban thinkers.
Dóra is associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest, Institute of Marketing and Media, head of the Department of Marketing, Media and Designcommunication. Her areas of research include diffusion of new technology in personal communication, designcommunication, co-creation, projective research techniques. Her areas of education involve: strategic and creative planning of marketing communication, design management, advertising management.
Vype Activation Manager at British American Tobacco
Design and Innovation consultant
I am curious about people’s culture, stories and needs. I am very keen to listen, see and discover how they think, how they behave, why and how we can help. As a Design Thinking Consultant, I am collaborating in the development of design projects for social and technology innovation at Bayteq in Quito, where we centre our research and outcomes in humans.
Social designer
Project Lead and Community Developer
Ella is currently working as a Project Lead and Community Developer for social and environmental consultancy Liminal. Her academic and work background spans psychosocial research, international development, migrant’s rights advocacy, youth mentorship, women’s empowerment and public health, with equity and justice the thread that ties them together. Ella is a DJ and radio host and puts on parties with her community sound-system cooperative.
Urbanism
Service Design Consultant & Design Researcher
Biology
Landscape architect
Architect
Biotechnology
Co-founder and Food Curator
Eszter is a curator and cultural mediator who is interested in CEE regional creative industry and local movements. She is the co-founder of Holis and was part of the team until 2019.
Designer
Project manager
Eszter is constantly looking for opportunities where she can use her knowledge and experience for a greater good. Combining her Sociology degree with her background in tech, she’s currently working as a project manager in a social enterprise that aims to educate and empower hearing impaired professionals to make a successful career in the digital economy.
Experience Designer
Media design
Fanni Csernátony is addicted to design workshops and co-creation ever since she started studying Product Design in Moholy Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME). She participated and organized several events focusing on creative teamwork. She believes that the design process works best if it involves people with different cultural and professional backgrounds.
Product Designer
Innovation & Service design
Painter
Product designer at Studio Rygalik
Partner at Studio Rygalik
Gosia graduated from the Design Department at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts (2010 MA). She also studied at the Danmarks Designskole and gained her first professional design experience in Copenhagen. During the studies in Warsaw she was a member of the PG13 platform – responding to experimental design briefs, exhibiting, organizing and taking part in design workshops and competitions as well as industry supported projects.
Strategic Product Design
Gunjan is a strategic designer and researcher who likes working on challenges that involve people, processes and systems. Her skills and tools are drawn from diverse fields of practice: human-centred design, business strategy, organizational change and education. She is a lifelong learner and enjoys herself best while working on transdisciplinary projects in diverse contexts.
Designer at ChemAxon
I work as a product designer at a cheminformatics company. I define myself as a generalist with the obsession of small details. I believe that my role as a designer is to facilitate co-creation and give the ability to people with the relevant knowledge to share their voice. Continuous experimentation and small iterations motivate me the most during my everyday work.
UX Design
Gábor is a UX team lead and product designer at Emarsys (part of SAP). He spends most of his time there facilitating a common understanding between teams and improving design processes. He’s the co-founder of MOME ID, one of the most acknowledged product design courses in Hungary where he’s a course leader, lecturer and mentor. With the MOME ID team, he’s been running design camps since 2016 dealing with non-digital co-creation, design thinking, speculative design & service design.
Cinematography
Circular design strategist & sustainability advocate
A circular design consultant, strategist, leader and facilitator. His expertise comes from human-centred design, circular design, design process & management. He helps companies create product and service strategies based on innovation, sustainability and circular economy. Teacher at various universities around Europe. A co-founder of two design consultancies, Change Pilots in Poland and Next Agents in Sweden. He always brings a multicultural perspective thanks to years of practice abroad, including New York and London and such organisations as Parsons School of Design - The New School and IDEO. In the past 20 years, He worked as a strategist, manager, team leader, and sustainability advocate.
Graphic design
Customer Experience Designer at O.P. Holdings
International & Public Affairs Manager at Dutch Design Foundation
Ingrid is a connector, conceptor, communicator with a focus on co/design for people and planet. Over the years she has initiated projects for the use of design as the driver for social innovation, economic growth and sustainable development. She has extensive experience in cross-sectorial partnerships between public authorities, industries, businesses and designers.
Lector, designer & Expert
Lector of environmental education, designer, environmental projects co-creator, and sustainable development expert. She is associated with Veronica' Ecological Institute and Centre since 2021. Veronica is an NGO that protects nature, the environment and the climate and shows others how to do it. Veronica has been involved in this field for over 35 years through different projects and activities aiming for carbon neutrality and connecting with all relevant stakeholders locally, nationally and internationally. Her experience comes from inner sustainability, resilience, robust networking and linking local, national and international stakeholders. Irena used to work and lived in Scotland, in Edinburgh, for a decade, where she obtained a design degree. She profoundly appreciates art and crafts, linking environmental education with experiential and experimental learning and art education.
Service Designer
Iria's passion is using the power of design processes to transform people's lives. After studying psychology Iria started her career in 2001 working as user researcher / ethnographer (exploring people’s needs in their context of use) working in several private companies in Barcelona. In 2005 she learned how to integrate user/cultural research with design and business processes.
Content Strategist & Social Innovator
Customer Success Manager
I am energetic and self-motivated advisor with more than 10 years’ experience in: project management, strategic communication, business development, event management & service design.
Sociology
Strategic Product Designer
Designer
Jana is a designer from design studio Pábení from the Czech Republic. Pábení wants to bring sustainability into the lives of organizations. Jana helps fulfil this vision with educational design, organizational culture projects and regenerative, circular service design. She deeply believes that the responsibility of designers is to take care of the needs of users and stakeholders as well as society and planet.
Design student
I am a 2nd-year Interior Design master's student enrolled at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia. I am currently living in the Netherlands.
Innovation Consultant & Agile Coach
Designer
I am a product / graphic designer. I was the co-founder of Have a Bite (a media startup) and I have been working with Ergo Design - a design and consultancy agency.
Design Researcher and Service Designer
Jimena is a curious creative and change maker, passionate about improving people’s lives through design. She thrives on connecting with and learning from people, and on coming up with new and enhanced ways of doing things. She has vast experience in user research, creative facilitation and service design, having worked with multiple clients across varied industries. She works now as a Service Designer at wearereasonablepeople.
Joana is a researcher, architect and intermedial artist. She coordinates and curates Topias Urbanas (Urban Topias), an artistic and urban research project which, combining a processual, collaborative and relational ethos with a discursive and reflexive dimension generates experimental and interrogative cartographies of the multiple layers that compose urban space.
Senior Lecturer at Royal College of Art
Dr John Stevens joined the Royal College of Art in 2013 to help launch the new Global Innovation Design MA. John’s research interests concern the application of design methods to emerging contexts of innovation such as service design, multi-disciplinary design and design management, especially applied to social, cross-cultural and humanitarian innovation. This necessarily encompasses the design of products, interactions and systems.
Writer, Advisor, Speaker
John Thackara is a philosopher, writer and advisor. He helps companies and cities design innovation platforms that benefit all life, not just human life. His most recent book (of 12) is How To Thrive In the Next Economy: Designing Tomorrow's World Today. John curated the celebrated Doors of Perception conference for 20 years, first in Amsterdam, and later in cities throughout India.
Asking what else is possible here?
Johnnie is a facilitator and author who is fascinated by the ways small changes and gestures in the present are shaping our futures while we are often distracted by making big plans. He's the author of Unhurried, a book based on a decade long experiment in slowing down conversations and becoming more patient with silence, and with relating more quietly to discomfort instead of trying to simply escape it, or consume our way out of it.
special education teacher, 'tanoda' teacher at the Real Pearl Foundation
Julcsi has worked in the model village of the Foundation, in Told for 6 years. She joined at the very beginning of the Tanoda program during her university years as a volunteer. She now works with children from the age of 3 to 18, but her focus area is early childhood development, especially preschool programs and motor skill development.
Sustainable Design Consultant & Facilitator
A dynamic and versatile professional, recognized for her expertise in sustainable design and innovation. As a design researcher, process facilitator, and ideas initiator, she specializes in creating immersive experiences, systems, and workshops that enable companies, brands, organizations, and events to effectively communicate their sustainable value to users. Her extensive experience spans a wide range of industries, including product, service, and manufacturing companies, as well as collaborations with design and culture studios in Paris, Helsinki, New York, Stockholm and across Poland. Co-founder of Change Pilots and Next Agents.
Brand manager
Although we have different topics for each of our summer schools, they all focus on learning skills that will strengthen your ability to solve complex problems — regardless of the field you come from. We believe that hard skills are important, but with the rapid evolution of technology, a focus on hard skills can potentially leave you vulnerable to change as these often have a shorter shelf life. Soft skills, on the other hand, enable you to adapt to change more easily.
You will be working on a real project in an interdisciplinary team because soft skills learning should be experience based. You will attend a 10 days / 9 nights on site workshop with both preparatory work and post-workshop assignment. You will produce project deliveries that might be used for further development and implementation thus achieving real impact in a long run.
Besides the obvious part of learning the aforementioned mentioned skills, you will be part of an ever growing community of Holis alumni. Holis alumni consist of team facilitators and participants who are spread across the world. It’s a network of like-minded people who are helpful and occasionally even collaborate on projects.
This program is a non-profit endeavour. We receive a lot of volunteer work, get support from our sponsors, and grants. Nevertheless, your contribution is essential to make it work. We kindly ask that you pay as much as you can within the following ranges.
Student/Unemployed: €250-300.
(Self)Employed: €300-350.
Step 1 — Registration
This is you saying that you are interested in participating. We will ask you for some basic personal data and nudge you to complete your application.
Step 2 — Motivation letter and project portfolio
In your motivation letter, please tell us why you would like to attend Holis, what you expect from it, your relevant experiences, what you find interesting about the topic of this year’s summer school, and how can you contribute to the summer school and your team. Your motivation letter should be around 500 words. In your project portfolio, you should present projects that you were part of that are relevant to the summer school. Your project portfolio should be a one-page document.
Step 3 — Shortlisting
We will evaluate your application based on your motivation letter and project portfolio. We are looking for participants who excel in their chosen profession, are eager to learn, open for interdisciplinary collaboration, and have a sense of social and environmental justice. We will evaluate applications on the last day of each month meaning that if you submit your application earlier, you will get your results earlier.
Step 4 — Video interview
We will have a 30 minute interview with every shortlisted applicant to understand each one better and to answer any questions.
Step 5 — Final selection
We will make the final selection of participants one week after the application deadline at the latest. After you pay your participation fee, we will start the preparatory work online.
The Holis approach is different from traditional courses. We pay attention to every aspect of your well-being and learning. Our venue is in a rural environment away from the rush of big cities; we prepare all of the delicious food that you will eat ourselves; there are opportunities to participate in sporting activities, games, and evening bonfires. All of this is intentionally planned to deliver a unique and unforgettable educational experience.
The first Holis focused on the future scenarios of an old felt factory in Hungary, which at the time was suffering from a 90% loss of income due to the rise in popularity of synthetic felts. As a result of the solutions that Holis participants helped to identify and implement, the felt factory now has new owners, new products, and other thriving business activities. Since then we’ve been working on various challenges in different countries.