Hello!
My name is Claudia. I’m a strategic futurist and design researcher helping organizations navigate uncertain futures through trend research and strategic foresight.
here is studio clau
The future is always one step ahead. However, it is being shaped by the choices we make now.
I help organization navigate uncertain futures. Through trend research and strategic foresight, I translate emerging signals into concrete vision, ambition, and innovation opportunities.
here is studio clau
How I work
My work typically moves through the two below-mentioned interconnected phases, though projects can focus on either depending on your needs
Discovery & Framing
Understanding the future landscape
Qualitative design research—using design methods to explore and understand emerging patterns. Through trend research, user research, expert interviews and foresight, identifying and analyzing the signals and insights that are most relevant.
Making It Tangible
Translation from insights to strategic direction
Translating research into strategic reports, future scenarios, vision development, innovation roadmaps, or design direction including color, material and finish strategies. Including facilitating co-creation workshops and reports that bring these insights to life for teams.
past work
Industries & clients
Project lead, design researcher
Project lead for exploring and implementing regional hybrid care pathways, using design research and stakeholder engagement to ensure seamless patient experience.
Trend researcher, strategic futurist and facilitator
Co-creation of 2040 ambition document defining vision and requirements for new hospital building, combining trend research and strategic foresight with stakeholder input.
Service design lead and design researcher
Support digital transformation by introducing and developing customer journeys to ensure client-first thinking.
Design researcher
Visitor research and customer journey mapping to generate insights for optimizing the museum visitor experience.
Trend researcher and facilitator
Generation Alpha/Gen Z trend research exploring future travel behaviors and strategy workshops supporting sustainability vision development.
Future and aesthetic trend expert
Expert panel member for the past 25 years, working alongside an array of international architects, designers and trend experts to analyze socio-cultural and design trends, to identify future indicators that will shape living environments, and inform global color forecasting. This supports the selection of the Color of the Year.
Design research method expert
Design research method guidance for IKEA internal knowledge platform, providing teams with practical frameworks for applying design methods.
Consultant
Subsidy application support providing outside-in perspective, global benchmarking of nature-led design organizations, and strategic framing from cross-sector experience.
About me
How can I help design a future that is sustainable, healthy and equitable?
After starting my career at Philips Design in 1997, where I spent over two decades directing global trend research programs and translating future insights into business innovation. My work began with color, material and finish (CMF) and aesthetic trend research—an expertise I continue to maintain and develop through ongoing work with Akzo Nobel’s Color Futures expert collective.
Now at StudioClau, I work as what I like to call a future curator—helping organizations navigate the overwhelming stream of future signals, patterns and trends to identify what truly matters for their specific context. I believe effective futures work requires combining your in-depth knowledge with outside-in perspectives, which is why I prefer to work closely with internal teams through joint research and co-creation workshops.
Apart from client work, I speak at conferences, serve in expert panels, and occasionally present at educational institutions or institutes/universities/schools like TU Delft.
Always driven by this question: how can I help design a future that is sustainable, healthy and equitable?
what inspires me
Blogs
Iris van Herpen | Kunsthal
I experience nothing but awe when I see the incredible work of Iris van Herpen at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. The exhibition called Sculpting the Senses shows not only next level haute couture, but also her world of inspiration that consists of creatures of the deep sea, algae, birds, 3D printing, CERN, and the cosmos. Almost science fiction, but never fashionable considering a short-lived hype. These garments reinvent contemporary fashion, while never growing out of date. What inspired me the most were the two large walls containing samples, try outs, experiments, and prints. Little ideas, some of which have been translated into a dress. It definitely triggered my passion for tinkering with materials, something that I have not been practicing for a long time. Sketching with materials complements the more analytical and strategic work that is often not tangible at all.
What inspired me: Staying true to your own unique ideas and sticking to them results in an authentic expression that stands the test of time.
Agnostic design method
How do people experience a museum? There are different research techniques to find out. These are often quantitative, such as a post visit survey. After having been active in the context of healthcare for quite some years already, switching to another ‘industry’ can seem interesting yet challenging. But what did strike me is that the method of mapping out the museum visitor experience does not seem to be all that different when compared to a patient journey in a hospital. The visitor experience starts when planning a trip to a museum the moment when the visitor shares their story with friends and family, post visit. And similar to patients interacting with healthcare professionals in different steps, the visitor encounters museum staff and multiple channels during their journey. The holistic overview of a visitor experience map provided the Rijksmuseum in-depth insight into the interconnectedness of all these different stakeholders, including their activities and experiences. Mapping this ‘ecosystem’ out, showed not only challenges visitors encounter, but also how different phases and stakeholders in the journey cause them.
What I learned: This design research method is powerful because of its focus on experience from a user-perspective. By visualizing the entire visitor journey it provides the museum staff and management with insights where to optimize. And despite two industries that seem very different from each other, it works.
who I work with
Partners and network
Studioclau is me, Claudia, however I am not alone. I work with an international network of experts and creatives to ensure bringing in the right talent and expertise, at the right place, in the right combination.
Group of Humans
Global creative collective composed of a network of designers, strategists, and makers who work in “tribes” to solve global challenges for clients like design-driven leaders and CMOs.
in close collabboration with
Breque
Cultural analysis, collaborative trend tools and design strategy
Likely
Trends, future research, scenario planning and lifestyle trends
Specto Consulting
Vision and strategy enhanced by AI
Design Intangibles
Design research and innovation strategy
Yellow Chess
Strategy, innovation and design
How can I help you?
I am open to a conversation over a good cup of coffee.