What makes a space a place?
That's the question I've been working on for the better part of a decade, inside organisations, across institutions, and increasingly in the communities beyond them.
I'm Andrea Brena. I am a culture strategist and systems designer. Trained at Design Academy Eindhoven, I think about organisations less as structures, more as systems of behaviour.
At adidas, that thinking took the form of MakerLab Herzo: a platform I helped grow from a physical space into a 1,000-member global network for experimentation, knowledge exchange, and creative collaboration. The work taught me how organisations move, and how to build the tools and conditions that make creative collaboration possible at scale.
Outside adidas, I run Sorriso, a research an editorial studio exploring how communities, places, and organizations create belonging, and write Hotpot, a newsletter on technology and behaviour.
If the intersection of place, creative culture, and the tools that make both possible is relevant to something you're working on, I'd like to hear about it.