Expand: Stretching the Future By Design

With Expand: Stretching the Future By Design, authors Jens Martin Skibsted, a multiple-award-winning designer, entrepreneur, and design philosopher, and Christian Bason, political scientist and CEO of the Danish Design Centre, take listeners beyond "design thinking" to challenge current habits and carve out new space for more sustainable innovation.

From transforming the ways we do business and reimagining health care, to creating planet-restoring housing and humanizing our digital lives in an age of AI, Expand explores how expansive thinking across six key areas—time, proximity, value, life, dimensions, and sectors—can provide radical, useful solutions to a whole host of current problems around the globe.

With powerful real-world examples, the book challenges our freewheeling belief in technological determinism and its insensitivity toward ethics, humanity, and the environment.

Expand is the first book to not just critique design thinking, but welcome it as a starting point for an ambitious, wide-ranging tale of how to expand and think beyond it.

The best way to predict the future is to design it. Expand is the book that shows us how.

About the Author

Christian Bason, PhD, is the CEO of the Danish Design Centre, a not-for-profit institution funded by the Danish government working to advance the value of design for business and society. He is former Director of MindLab, the Danish government’s innovation team and former Business Manager at Ramboll, a global consultancy. He is the author of seven books on innovation, design and leadership, including Design for Policy and Leading Public Design. He has written for among others Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review and the Danish weekly Monday Morning. Christian is a Board Member of the Royal Academy of Architecture, Design and Conservation in Copenhagen, a Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Agile Governance, and former Chairman of the European Commission’s Expert Group on Public Sector Innovation. He is an external lecturer in executive training at Oxford Saïd Business School, Copenhagen Business School and the EU School of Administration. Christian holds an MSc in political science and a PhD in design leadership.

Jens Martin Skibsted, Global Partner at Manyone, is a multiple award-winning designer, entrepreneur, and design philosopher. Best known for his urban mobility designs for Biomega, and collaborations with design superstars such as Marc Newson and Bjarke Ingels. He is the founder of Biomega and has helped found several design consultancies including Skibsted Ideation, KiBiSi, and Manyone. His designs live in the collections at the MoMA, Le Cnap, Designmuseum Danmark, SFMOMA, etc. He is on the board of the Danfoss Foundation, Biomega and Manyone and a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Mobility Transitions; He is formerly the Chairman of the Danish Design Council, the Vice Chair of World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Design Innovation and Co-Chair of World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Entrepreneurship and on the advisory board of the INDEX prize and MindLab. Jens Martin is also a Young Global Leader alumnus who has spoken at Davos, DLD, TED, and more. His writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, Harvard Business Review, Børsen, Washington Post and Fast Company.