RE:START Lab Instructors

Jörgen van der Sloot is the founder of Minkowski. He’s helped numerous organizations to get breakthroughs in their thinking and in their perspective on the world, by helping them reframe their strategies by reasoning from a future perspective. He’s interviewed hundreds of scientists, scholars and business leaders on the topics of change, transformation and the future and has developed a methodology to map future possibilities for organizations based on their insights and the work of mathematician Hermann Minkowski. Jörgen has collaborated with many internationally operating organizations in the fields of media and consumer brands, finance and investment, insurance and pensions, education and charity and has hosted sessions for groups of people ranging in size from 1 to 1000 participants, from boardroom to classroom. \

Jörgen has talked at TEDx and speaks regularly at other conferences. Jörgen has been collaborating with Columbia University School of the Art’s Digital Storytelling Lab since it was founded. He also holds an advising position at a Wall St investment firm and is an executive coach to various senior leaders in the business world.

Rachel Eve Ginsberg is a creative strategist and experience designer exploring the relationship between information systems, interaction design and sensemaking. She is the founding director of the Interaction Lab at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, an embedded R&D program driving a reimagining of the audience experience through internal workshopping, public programs merging design and museum practice, and a commissioning program that engages the design community as creative collaborators. Through freelance practice, Branding for Experience, while leading strategy and partnerships for the Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab, and over years traversing retail, business and design strategy, Rachel has worked on experiential, multi-platform initiatives, that combine research, facilitation, strategic definition, and design, for organizations large and small, across digital, physical and human interactions. 

In her artistic work, Rachel designs interactive experiences to inspire self-discovery, compassion and catharsis, most notably as one of three lead artists on Frankenstein AI, a polymorphic participatory theater project, and official selection of Sundance’s New Frontier and was co-commissioned for International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2018. These days, Rachel is working on a new interactive project that draws from the contemporary language of wellness and personal futures practice to design interventions that help build deeper knowledge of self.  

Lance Weiler is a storyteller, entrepreneur and educator. He is an alumnus of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and recognized as a pioneer because of the way he mixes storytelling and technology. Wired Magazine named him “One of twenty-five people helping to re-invent entertainment and change the face of Hollywood.” His works have screened/exhibited at the TIFF Lightbox, Museum of the Moving Image as well as Sundance, Tribeca and New York Film Festivals. He was nominated for an International Emmy in digital fiction for his work on Collapsus: The Energy Risk Conspiracy. Weiler’s most recent work entitled, Where There’s Smoke had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. IndieWire wrote “Over 100 movies screened at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, but one of its best offerings lets you walk inside the frame and experience a story from the inside out.”

Lance is a highly sought-after thought leader in the entertainment industry – in particular supporting companies in re-shaping their media holdings for the 21st Century. He has consulted programs and initiatives for IBM, Twitter, Microsoft, Samsung, Chernin Entertainment, Ubisoft, Penguin Books, the U.S. State Department, CAA, Ogilvy, McCann-Erickson and others. In the process he has helped to create, design and shape entertainment properties that have reached billions of people. Over the course of his career Lance has developed a unique understanding of interdisciplinary teams and how to grow businesses in an ever-shifting digital landscape. After speaking at the World Economic Forum in 2012, Lance was invited to serve on two steering committees, one focused on the Future of Content Creation and the other centered on Digital Governance.

Lance is an Associate Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University School of the Arts where he is jointly appointed in Film and Theatre. In 2013, he co-founded the School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab and serves as its director leading and shaping the lab’s vision and programming.

About Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab

The Columbia DSL designs stories for the 21st Century. We build on a diverse range of creative and research practices originating in fields from the arts, humanities and technology. But we never lose sight of the power of a good story. Technology, as a creative partner, has always shaped the ways in which stories are found and told. In the 21st Century, for example, the mass democratization of creative tools — code, data and algorithms — have changed the relationship between creator and audience. The Columbia DSL, therefore, is a place of speculation, of creativity, and of collaboration between students and faculty from across the University. New stories are told here in new and unexpected ways.

About Minkowski

Minkowski, agency for applied futures, helps organizations to translate future possibilities into action and helps them build agency for change. We help apply the future to the present in highly customized strategic sessions in which we collaborate with strategy designers, business coaches, scientists, futurists, innovation experts, visualizers, trainers and facilitators that will engage actively with people from your organization.

We are named after Hermann Minkowski, one of Einstein’s teachers at the University of Zurich. His scientific research focused on relativity and in 1907 he showed that his former student’s work on special relativity could best be understood as a four-dimensional space-time. In plain English: he showed that the possible positions of a particle in the future were dependent on the past and present positions of that particle.

We use his thinking as a metaphor for our work with clients. Instead of mapping positions of particles we map the future possibilities for organizations. The possibilities in the future for any organization are not just determined by what is technologically feasible but rather by the organizational heritage (what’s in the DNA of your company) and by the current capabilities, skills and resources of the company.

Just like Hermann Minkowski we help others make history by changing the future.  http://www.minkowski.org/