UNESCO Chair
on Anticipatory Techniques and Future Design
Center for Future Design
The Center for Future Design (CFD)/ UNESCO Chair on Anticipatory Techniques and Future Design enables people, communities, and organizations to:
- use futures to create a peaceful and inclusive world in line with the UNESCO goals,
- apply social innovation techniques to imagine, prototype and bring about a better future,
- and embed these skills in local communities and organizations.
We explore, cultivate and teach social practices to imagine and bring about purposeful change.
Our Team
Michael Shamiyeh
UNESCO Chairholder / Professor /Advisory Board Member
Michael works with organizations to create a new and meaningful future (rather than fix the problems of the past). He combines the client's unique business experience, analytical rigor, and the output of creative collisions (the clash of multiple perspectives to reframe habitual thinking) to transform insight into impact.
Michael Shamiyeh holds a UNESCO Chair on Anticipatory Techniques and Future Design, is a partner of the International Board Foundation (IBF), and was a Visiting Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering (CDR) at Stanford University, USA from 2017-2020. Together with both institutions, he founded the Center for Future Design (CFD) in Linz. He is Advisory Board Member of voestalpine since 2020.
Agnes Buchberger
Assistant
Agnes assists with CFD's organizational matters since 2020. She holds bachelor’s degrees in Philosophy as well as Cultural and Social Anthropology (University of Vienna) and completed her master’s degree in Social Ecology (University of Klagenfurt).
Klaus Fronius
Advisory Board Member
Klaus Fronius is an honorary senator at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), was head of the family-run Fronius International Ltd. for over 35 years and switched to the company’s supervisory board in 2012. During his time as managing partner (1980 to 2011), he played a key role in the strategic direction of the company and was one of the first pioneers in the field of alternative energy generation to take future-oriented steps.
As co-initiator of the commercial academy in Wels in 1994, the engineer Fronius made a fundamental contribution to the development of the research world in the area of renewable energies in Upper Austria.
Bolko von Oetinger
Advisory Board Member
Bolko von Oetinger received his PhD in foreign policy from Arnulf Baring at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin) and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. From 1974 to 2008 he worked for the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in Menlo Park, Paris, and Munich. In addition to his client work with a focus on strategy, organization, and innovation, he also held a number of international management positions.
He has been teaching strategic management at WHU in Koblenz/Vallendar since 1998 and was appointed honorary professor in 2004. Bolko von Oetinger is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Wittenberg Center for Global Ethics. As a member of the advisory board of the Bavarian Association of Family Businesses in Agriculture and Forestry and the Bavarian State Monument Council, he is committed to the preservation of historic buildings.
Karlheinz Schwuchow
Advisory Board Member
Karlheinz Schwuchow has held the professorship for international management at Bremen University since 1999 and heads the CIMS Center for International Management Studies. After studying business administration and earning an MBA in the USA, he worked from 1985 to 1991 in executive development at the USW University Seminar in economics at Schloss Gracht. While working he completed a doctorate on the side Dr. rer. pol.
Schwuchow held several positions. Among others he worked in management and strategy consulting, was founding managing director of the Center for Financial Studies – Institute for Continuing Education Ltd. in Frankfurt / Main, was managing director of the GISMA Business School in Hanover, and was the founding officer for the Center for Leadership, Innovation, and Change at Jacobs University Bremen.
Larry Leifer
Emeritus Co-Founder
Larry Leifer is Director of the Center for Design Research at Stanford University. He joined the faculty in 1976. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and spent four years at the Human Information Processing Laboratory at NASA Ames Research Center.
His education includes a bachelor's degree in engineering, a master's degree in product design (art), and a PhD in biomedical engineering (neuroscience). He was the founding director of the Intelligent Product Design Laboratory, the Center for Design Research (CDR), the Stanford Learning Lab, and the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program at Stanford, among others. His teaching laboratory is the ME310 graduate program, an industry-based program for industrial design, innovation, and development.
Walter Brenner
Emeritus Co-Founder
Walter Brenner is a professor of business informatics and also managing director of the Institute for Business Informatics at the University of St. Gallen. He has held professorships at the University of Essen and the TU Bergakademie Freiberg.
From 1985 to 1989, Walter Brenner worked for Alusuisse-Lonza AG in Basel, most recently as head of application development—today we would say he was CIO. His research focuses on the industrialization of information management, industrial services, operational information systems, and the digital consumer business. He also works as a freelance consultant on issues relating to information management and preparing companies for the digital, networked world.
Our Origin
Founded in 2017, the Center for Future Design emerged from the Design-Organization-Media research laboratory that had been established fifteen years before to deal with the central questions of future management in order to focus specifically on the development of innovation and leadership skills in a corporate context. The challenges of our target group required a degree of flexibility and creativity in the learning process that could not be achieved within the structures and limits of a university. It required prioritizing social learning and the learning of learning in contrast to the abstract learning of conventional training formats through presenting of expertise and approaches.