Justine Carrion-Weiss

Justine is the founder and director of The Blooming Platypus, a design innovation agency based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, helping organisations address the business and societal challenges of the modern world and develop long-term creative solutions and strategies. In parallel, Justine also works as a design researcher at Northumbria University’s Responsible Innovation Hub. With 10 years of experience as a design practitioner-researcher, Justine's interests span across design-led innovation, responsible design, design facilitation, and design strategy. At the heart of her ethos lies a profound belief in design’s power to reframe challenges into opportunities for a fairer and more sustainable future.

Justine holds a BA in Foreign Languages and an MA in Multidisciplinary Innovation. Her PhD developed new strategic understandings of design facilitation about (1) the impact of design workshops on participants and organisations and (2) Design Listening, the way design facilitators listen to formulate essential questions in workshop settings. She was born near Dijon, France, and speaks French & English fluently, has a decent level of Spanish, and is working on getting her Portuguese back to a respectable level. Justine is the Social Secretary of Tyne Bridge Harriers and was Head of Communications for Nuevo Destino, a French-Honduran NGO helping kids in the poverty-stricken Honduran jungle.