About

Sophie

woman investigating plant a agroforestry garden

Bio

Born in the city of Amsterdam on the ninth floor of a big flat and moved to Texel when I was nine. The urban environment exchanged for dunes and beaches. I was suddenly able to do all kinds of things that were not allowed when we lived in the Bijlmer, such as cycling alone to visit friends and playing outside until late. The move changed everything and that's where my fascination with environments began.

Listen to this podcast for an in depth interview about me and my interest in co-initiating the Regeneration Coöperatieve. In Dutch.

Vision

Context•awareness

Context • circumstances in time that form the setting for an idea, worldview or performance and in term of which it can be understood

Awareness • state or ability to perceive, feel or be conscious of a particular situation

Imagine, you and I are sitting at a table and on this table we find a plant in a pot. We probably agree that we both see the same object by describing it: its shape, its name, its origin, its flowers, the materiality and maybe the monetary value. But harder to convey, is the amount of affiliated experiences both of us project on this plant. What this plant is to me, might vary a lot from what it means to you.

How we perceive reality is a collective, as well as a personal effort. Informed by culture, class, geography, values and urgency. If our reality is only partly shared, how can we make collective decisions that affect us all, like mitigating the ever evolving climate crisis, fight for social justice or answer more philosophical questions like; what is a good life?

Being a designer to me, is learning, building and transmitting something I call context awareness. A process to visualize underlying historical structures that, without us realizing it, influence a situation, our experience of a situation and what choices or solutions we see. This is especially important for people that are socialized as white and European, like myself, whose worldview is based on Enlightened and reductionistic values.

It is time for a more systemic perspective that is underlied by indigenous knowledge as well as cutting edge science in systems and chaos theory. Context awareness is an exercise in relationality, empathy and listening to voices that you might not immediately understand;human and non-human. Only then is it possible to co-create a future that not only respects the multifaceted reality of humans, but of the earth as a whole.