Heiner Benking
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Heiner Benking is a strong supporter of structured dialogue and of Future Worlds Center. He has been collaborating with Aleco Christakis and many of the historic figures who have pioneered in the establishment of the science of dialogic design. He has attended the 3rd International SDDP Facilitators Training School, which he has promoted publishing articles, such as the Commentary about the 3rd International Training School for SDD. He has also written an article following an interview he has taken from Aleco Christakis during the school [1] and on earlier occasions to revisit the foundational phase of the Club of Rome (1968-1970) [2] Heiner served the International Peace University project in the early 90ies and helped to establish the Club of Budapest as its first editor and international co-ordinator, after invited as Creative Member. He worked with Robert Jungk in the early 90ies and established with Bob's collegue Rüdiger Lutz Future Lab in Basel. He presently serves in the Board of Positive Nett-Works, and IHTEC, and as secretary of the Council on Global Issues and the Tagore-Einstein-Council, he is in the founding board of the Youth-Leader magazine. http://youth-leader.org
Heiner's professional live can be roughly divided into four decades. In the 70ies: studies, globetrotting, surveyor, planner, 80ies: marketing, management and organisation consulting, market research, agementcomputer-graphics industry, raising children, environmental research and management, 90ies: Global Change research and communication, summits, UN-G7 Harmonisation, environmental NGO's, Foundations, Councils, think-tanking, ..., 00ies: EXPO 2000, future and technology studies, youth and media projects, Environmental Education and policy making, peace organisations, Clubs, governance, facilitation, dialog and decision cultures, youth cross-media, independent journalist and writer/curator, ... The above rough "epoches" have much overlap. Maybe check his user-page at Wikipedia for details. [1] and the Positive Nett-Works PNW member page: http://www.euromedalex.org/node/9299
With respect to the Future Worlds Center this collection in the field of policy, think-tanks, capacity building, education and awareness, Youth and media, communication and conferencing might be more substantive and focussed: Heiner Benking helped in the foundational phase since 1993 to establish nodes and a cypernode and represented the Millennium Project and worked with Experconsult and technology think- tanks like the Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW) in Ulm, Germany and The Club of Budapest. He is a technician, engineer, planner, consultant, communicator and facilitator with an academic background in engineering, planning and other studies ranging from geophysics to philosophy and including regional and global modeling geo-ecology and geomorphology, and computer graphics programming. Benking has served as a consultant and facilitator, writer, curator, and organizer - maybe he is an in-betweener, gate-crasher, go-getter, and starter.
He began using maps and models 1970s as a surveyor and geophysicist in exploration and planning on a regional and national level. In the 1980s he explored the realms of mapping and modelling further by using drafting, visualization and management software. Benking participated in several global change related gatherings, exhibitions, and conferences from 1988-1995, in particular the 1990 Global Change exhibition where he helped design posters and exhibits.
In the past ten years Benking has focussed on education and policy-making. This has led to new forms of conferencing, dialogue and projects in knowledge organization, multi-lingual repositories, metaphors as interface projects, and culture navigation - defining reference rooms for library and museum information concepts. His activity areas range from Future studies to questions related to culture, cyberculture, creativity and cognition.
For more details pls visit Heiner's WIKIPEDIA User page (needs update): [2] and recently retrieved (10/2011) quite incomplete publications as found by Google Scholar: [3] and his Signature File with "hot" Links and Recent papers: [4]
