I've facilitated conversations between researchers, artists, corporates, students, children, and indigenous communities. That's where my strongest belief comes from:
(Almost everything I care about happens between one person and another, between worlds, between contexts, between realities. Black and white exist. What interests me is the scale of grays, and the color that sometimes shows up there.)
For fifteen years I've been working with people who learn, build, and innovate: in university halls, in workshops with teams, in communities just starting to take shape. What interests me most happens when someone stops repeating the same answer and dares to think and question out loud.
That's where design starts to be worth something.
My perspective is horizontal: I'm not an expert in a single field. I like connecting what I learn in each project with the others, which is why I'm always in several at once, all orbiting innovation and what's human.
I believe entrepreneurs and innovators are that small percentage of the world that can open new conversations and imagine better systems. That's who I like working with: empathetic people building new technologies, new kinds of organizations, new social ventures.
I don't think technology is the answer to everything. Neither is entrepreneurship, nor the humanities alone. I think we need to learn to hold conversations between those worlds, to find a balance that works for the planet and for most of us.
I don't have all the answers either. That's why my clients come to me: to think together, land the ideas they've been turning over, and open up new perspectives. Not to tell them what to do, but to figure it out with them.
This is where I feel most at home: at Origami Lab we design the innovation communities where good ideas finally meet. It's my everyday, and I almost always walk out having learned something too.
Discover Origami Lab
A platform for knowledge that travelsI'm co-founding it so that what social innovation learns in one country can reach another: who tried what, where, what worked and what didn't. No public name yet, hands already at work.
on its wayDesigning a collaboration program for multidisciplinary research on the future of CRISPR.
Building the impact entrepreneurship ecosystem in Leiden and The Hague, with PLNT and Humanity Hub.
Weaving a frugal innovation community.
Researching how to use AI for a better future.
(Every time I ask Betty to do a workshop for my startups, she leaves them jaw dropped.)
Sander Kuin
(She walked us through the process of validation and demonstrated how entrepreneurship can be social, human, and fun.)
Daniela Alvarán
I write about the grays, in English and Spanish, depending on which world feels closer that day. If you don't see the world in black and white either, you're in the right place.
Read the blogWhether to ask yourself questions you haven't asked, discover perspectives you hadn't considered, or land the ideas you've been turning over. One hour on a video call, entirely for what's yours, so you leave with something clearer than what you came in with.
If the challenge belongs to your team or your organization, that's Origami Lab territory.
