Hi! I’m Henriette Friis. I work at the intersection of project management, systems thinking, strategic design, sustainability, life centric innovation, societally engaged design & tech.
⚲ Copenhagen
I’m drawn to intersections and contradictions; the complexity of the spaces in which environmental, political, and social sustainability meet creativity, ethics, justice, and care. I’m driven by my curiosity about the world, and I thrive with novel challenges. I think systemically, and consider it a strength of mine that I’m able to identify both challenges and opportunities in complex systems.
What I offer is hard to put into a single box. Here are a few examples:
I help organisations create direction, structure & meaningful narratives.
I design, plan and execute programmes for learning.
I create and sustain meaningful partnership networks for collaboration.
I make ambitious experiments feasible.
I am passionate about identifying more equitable ways to share public resources and strengthen accessibility through sustainable and inclusive transformation. I believe life centric innovation and universal design are beautiful ways of doing this. By combining these two schools of thought, we can ensure better access to resources — while respecting and learning from nature.
I believe we all have a responsibility as humans to do what we can, with what we have. And to create a little more space for kindness and joy.
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After 3.5 years at ETHOS Lab, I decided it was time to try something else. I am currently looking for new work opportunities in Copenhagen. I’m open-minded to what should happen next, but would love to land somewhere where I can work with project management in the intersection of design/facilitation/creativity and sustainability/social innovation/systems thinking.
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I hold a Masters degree in Sustainability from Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Prior to this, I completed a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design from The Royal Academy in Copenhagen, Denmark, with one semester spent at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.
what people say about working with me
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what people say about working with me 〰️
“I had the great pleasure of hiring and working with Henriette at the ETHOS Lab. She had such a great presence and impact on the lab by building an inclusive community of students and staff to collectively work on ways of making the world a better place. Henriette has the rare ability to be strategically creative - not only creative for the creativity’s sake but creative to be thought provoking and forward thinking. If you need someone who is a doer and community builder with heart and a gentle sense of humour, then Henriette is the perfect fit.”
- Jessamy Perriam, former director at ETHOS Lab
“We had the great privilege of having Henriette as a service design intern at Meld Studios in Sydney, Australia. During her time, I also had the privilege of working directly with Henriette on a complex, highly political and emotionally-charged service design project. The employees involved in the process were very nervous about the implications of the work, and even skeptical that we would get to a collectively desirable outcome. The executive and customers of those involved were effusive around the process we took them through, and even more thrilled about the outcome as a future they could be excited about. Henriette was deep in this project from start to finish, right alongside us collecting, analysing and synthesising the insights around the experiences of delivering service today, capturing the aspirations of the future, and collectively crafting our recommendations that so successfully hit the mark. Henriette has shown herself to be an effective listener, quickly able to process and pivot within research to follow where the conversation will be most fruitful. She can easily see higher-order patterns and impacts, and is an incredibly clear thinker. She’s equally open to learning, taking advantage of all the opportunities she could take to learn and grow in her Design practice. Most importantly, she is a wonderful spirit to be around, is a dedicated team-player, and will thrive with any new challenge that comes her way. You should work with her. I’m glad we did.”
- Janna DeVylder, former director at Meld Studios
“I have had the joy of working with Henriette at the ETHOS Lab. Together we have developed a series of educational workshops that weaves intersectional feminist perspectives into practice-based experiments with computational technologies.
Henriette brings deep care into learning environments. With her warm approach, she makes space for designers, artists, researchers and students to come together and share their projects, their curiosities as well as their sorrows. She generously connects people in her network and has a sixth sense of knowing just who to bring together to make projects come to life.
I have learned so much from Henriette through our years at the ETHOS Lab and I hope you get the opportunity to work and learn with her as well.“
- Louie Søs Meyer, former colleague at ETHOS Lab
“In my time working with Henriette at Feminist Futures Helsinki, she consistently stood out as a community builder and connector. Henriette is someone who sees the bigger picture and brings the right people together. Her design-minded thinking, combined with strong project management and facilitation skills, means she can turn ideas into action with a can-do attitude that lifts the whole team. I’d work with her again in a heartbeat!”
- Helmi DeMaxi, former collaborator