Justin Cook

Justin W. Cook is the founding director of RISD’s Center for Complexity. He is a strategic designer working on the world’s most challenging problem sets, such as healthcare, sustainability and education. His passion is to tackle these systems challenges by designing innovative organizational architectures.

Until 2018, Justin was senior lead for strategy at the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, where he spent a decade working to focus Finnish society on greater sustainability and human well-being. His portfolio included strategic design, urban systems, decarbonization, impact investing and the future of education. In 2018, Palgrave published his book Sustainability, Human Wellbeing and the Future of Education. While at Sitra, Cook was a founding member of the Helsinki Design Lab. In 2016 he joined the OECD’s Observatory for Public Sector Innovation as an advisor. He has worked with organizations such as the UNDP, IAEA, Special Operations Command, RI National Guard, Harvard, MIT, Johns Hopkins University, Google, IBM, Infosys and Fidelity Investments. Justin holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Washington.