Oona Horx Strathern keynote speaker

Her interest in visions for the future started early with extensive childhood travels including a pioneering overland trip in a Landrover to India in 1965 to visit Le Corbusier’s “gift to the future”, Chandigarh and the Taj Mahal. She went to London’s notorious Holland Park Comprehensive School, the first purpose built “forward thinking” comprehensive. In 1985 she graduated with BA Hons in Human Geography from Bristol University where her dissertation was on the futurist architect and visionary Le Corbusier, entitled, “Le Corbusier: Utopian or Optimist?”

Following a career in print journalism for many different publications including Arts Review and The Observer newspaper, she became a writer / researcher / assistant producer for Central Observer Television – working on the pioneering show “Go For Green”, a lively weekly environmental news programme.

Later as a trend consultant for Trendbüro in Hamburg she worked for companies such as Beiersdorf, Unilever, and Philip Morris, reporting mainly on lifestyle trends ranging from packaging and philosophy to the role of women and men in society and the changing image of beauty. For many years she also wrote a quarterly study on the future of work for the Deutsche Bank. Since she moved to Vienna in 1999 and established the Zukunftsinstitut Horx, she has  consulted Libro on trends from London, Meinl on an international coffee bar concept with top designer Tom Dixon, and worked as a consultant on the lifestyle drink VERY.

She lives with her futurist husband Matthias Horx and their two bilingual sons, Tristan and Julian whose visions of the future focus at the moment on “sweets growing on trees” and “homework writing machines”.