Endings Studio
Bringing Design to organisational endings
Endings
Organisational endings take many forms—each with different starting points and contexts. Start-ups increasingly design with the end in mind from their inception, building sunset clauses into their founding documents. Civil society organisations face closure for various reasons: some have successfully achieved their original mission; others can no longer secure funding in an increasingly stretched landscape; whilst some recognise that the context they were created to address has fundamentally shifted. Zombie institutions persist despite struggling to serve their purpose and stay relevant. Meanwhile, philanthropic foundations and endowments are reimagining what responsible endings or redistribution look like — designing intentional flows for their capital that prioritise impact over perpetuity.
Design
Design practice brings essential methodologies and mindsets to the work of organisational endings. Where traditional approaches often treat closure as failure or administrative necessity, design reframes endings as opportunities for intentionality, creativity, learning, and legacy —painting a different vision of endings that can be productive, hopeful, generative, even joyous. Strategic design helps organisations see their ending within broader systems — understanding ripple effects, interdependencies, and opportunities for wisdom transfer. As a form of foresight work, it helps us prepare for and build capabilities to end things in different and better ways. The designer's toolkit can provide all kinds of frameworks, tools, structure, and processes —creating space to navigate endings with care, intention, and grace.
Design doesn't just make endings more palatable; it makes them more purposeful, helping us usher in a different future.
Endings Studio
Endings Studio is responding to the growing interest in bringing greater intent to organisational endings and designing with the end in mind throughout an organisation's lifecycle. We see design’s important role in this emerging field — synthesising different forms of expertise, holding space for layered perspectives, and blending practical constraints with cultural attunement and care — as a living practice shaped through doing and thinking. We are here to do two things:
Grow and deepen relationships across the field so that we can curate, form and mobilise collaborations of people with different experiences and practice as 'Accompaniment Teams' for organisational endings in different contexts.
Be a rehearsal home for collaboration and experimentation—bringing together work, ideas, and explorations around organisational endings. We illuminate good practice, making visible the wisdom that already exists, whilst trialling, mocking up, and crafting new tools and resources together.