Who are we?

Andy and Renata started working together in 2022, designing and running the LXD Academy in Addis Ababa for GIZ, with ReDI School and local Ethiopian partners. A year, kick-off to hand-over. We have worked as a pair since.

What we share is a way of working. We care about the detail: the order of two questions, how long a silence is allowed to last, what the room looks like when people walk in. Most of it nobody notices, which is the point. It is the difference between a session that works and one that almost works.

We design with imagination. A learning objective can be met a hundred ways and most of them are a slide and a breakout. We would rather find the one that people are still talking about a year later.

And nothing is there by accident. Every exercise, every break, every prompt is answering a question about where the group is and where it needs to get to. If we cannot say why something is in the design, it comes out.

Recommendation

I had the great pleasure of collaborating with Renata and Andy for a year in 2022. Together with our local Ethiopian partners, we designed and implemented the LXD Academy in Addis Abbeba for the GIZ (German government international aid agency).
From kick-off to the final hand-over to local partners, it was one of the most enjoyable and impactful collaborations I’ve had. Andy and Renata delivers extremely high professional output in a very human and friendly manner.
I’d love to work with them again and hereby give my highest praise and recommendations.

Anne Kjaer Bathel, Founder & CEO ReDI School of Digital Integration

Andy Sontag

Learning experience designer · Facilitator · Program Director, Kaospilot Experience Design · Co-founder, Sidecar

I design learning experiences that spark and sustain human development.

I am Program Director of Kaospilot Experience Design, and the method I teach there has travelled further than I planned: trust-building between citizens and the Dutch police, how Echoing Green convenes global changemakers, Google employees, LEGO designers, Sitra's work on sustainable behaviour change in Finland.

I believe that through a movement of developmental science and experience design practitioners, we can build a more sustainable, compassionate and thriving world. By getting better at the hard work of supporting adults to learn and change in the way they want to. That is why I co-founded Sidecar.

Renata Landa López

Human Centered Design · Facilitator · Learning experience designer

I design experiences that move people.

That has meant testing and finding the intersection between learning, reflection and the experience itself. The path has taken me from working with Human-Centered Design at the Hasso Plattner Institute Design Thinking School establishing formats that focus on mindset and process to creating a Learning Experience Design Academy in Ethiopia in partnership with Kaospilot, GIZ and ReDI School. Day to day, I have the privilege of accompanying people in leadership and presence through different formats at Kearney.

Using compassion and creating experiences that stay with people afterwards interests me as much as what happens in the room.

Sean Bolton

Engineering Manager at Monzo (former Lyft, Pleo, Mozilla)

I am a product maker focused on building products that create meaningful human experiences.

I have a multidisciplinary background that includes philosophy, design, and engineering. I've worked at tech companies in San Francisco, Copenhagen, and London.

I care about enabling people to develop into the best version of themselves, and believe that through this we create a positive impact in the world. That's why I'm excited to work with Sidecar.

Recommendation

I've had the pleasure of collaborating with Andy on various projects and, together with Renata, on the first and second iterations of the LXD (Learning Experience Design) Academy in Ethiopia. As the context was new to us all, I saw how they both built the project with real care and commitment. They are excellent as learning experience designers because they are themselves always learning. I always leave encounters with them so enriched. While they each bring a unique and complementary set of expertise, ideas, and personality to the work, they share core values that make them trustworthy and, really, just fun partners to work with: genuine empathy, professional integrity (all substance, no fluff!), wisdom from deep practice, and loads of good humour!

Marite P. Irvine, Founder of Forge Futures and Executive Director at the Research Institute for the Futures of Education (RIFE)