Co-Founder, Custodian, CEO

Suné is a designer, educator, social and impact entrepreneur and a design activist. Operationally, she fills the role of the Managing Director of OD TNL NPC and the Program and Festival Director of the ODA Festival.

She is also the custodian of the Open Design concept. Part of her role focuses on stakeholder engagements and relationship building while also focusing on creating accessible opportunities for future skills development across Afrika and beyond at scale.

Not only has she taught design for more than 15 years but she was also one of the key drivers behind convincing the National Department of Basic Education in South Africa to acknowledge and include Design as an independent subject choice at secondary school level. Back in 2006 SA was the very first country in the world to introduce Design at this level. She also contributed in an advisory capacity to the development of the current National Design Curriculum used in South African schools.

She has published extensively and was also the contributing editor of the three nationally approved design textbooks and teachers’ manuals produced for the subject Design that are still being used throughout South African schools.

She was the original concept and content developer of the Woolworths “Making the Difference Through Design” (MTDTD) program, which was in 2009 acknowledged as a finalist in the 2009 INDEX: Design to Improve Life®, the world’s biggest design award. (Denmark, Copenhagen)

The key motivation behind Suné’s involvement in a project is its ability to mobilise change at any scale – driving change and transformation in its respective sectors to stimulate and develop regenerative economies, flourishing environments and thriving cultures and communities. The power of creativity and its ability to enable the design of a future culture of problem solvers, innovators, entrepreneurs and change agents drives her ongoing agenda especially for Afrika.

She is the former editor of the biannual online publication Design>Ed; was an assistant researcher for the WDC2014 (World Design Capital) bid in Cape Town and served on the advisory committee for the development of the Western Cape Provincial Innovation policy. She has also contributed to the initial development phase of the Western Cape Design Strategy (a first for Africa) and served on the SABS (South African Bureau of Standards) Design Institute’s Panel of Design Experts.

Suné is regularly invited to speak at conferences and design related events. A few highlights include: keynote at the Danish Health Conference, addressing the importance of design-led innovation in the health care sector with a key focus on Afrikan innovations that’s contributing to quality of life; participating during Bologna Design Week as a speaker at the FutureDesignEd Symposium; Afrikan representative and participant in first International Days for Deans and Design Experts Summit in Barcelona to collaborate on designing a road map to integrate the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals across all international school curricula; invited by the International Council of Design to represent Open Design Afrika and Cape Town UNESCO City of Design team in Beijing during the Beijing Design Week 2018 and represented the Cape Town UNESCO City of Design team in Singapore. University of Stellenbosch Business School’s international visitors programme for MBA’s also offered her an exciting opportunity to share her thoughts and understanding of the power and growing importance of “Big Picture Thinking and the development of Creative Intelligence” in order to collectively design a future world we can all feel proud to live, work and play in.