Encounter is a cross-domain research & design practice held together by one stance: continuously curious. We follow dissipative systems wherever they show up: cellular biology, evolutionary dynamics, female health, organisations, change programs, technology. The shared question is always the same. Where has the system stalled, and what would let it complete?
Founded in 2026 in Amsterdam, by Raimo van der Klein.
A dissipative system is anything that takes in energy, does work, and gives back disorder. Cells, tumours, hormonal cycles, populations under pressure, organisations, change programs, the technologies reshaping the cycles we live in. They look unrelated until you find the structure they share. When you do, the same question becomes useful in all of them: where in its cycle has this system stalled, and what intervention would let it complete?
The practice is small and intentionally cross-domain. Cancer biology is where most of our current evidence lives, because the measurements there are sharp and the consequences of getting it right are immediate. Evolutionary dynamics, female health, organisations, change programs, and technology are where the same questions reach further. We work across substrates on purpose. The pattern only confirms itself by holding in more than one place.
The name Encounter is the name because information is revealed in the meeting: between the immune cell and the tumour, between a learner and a problem, between a person and a new environment. We don't claim to know things in advance. We meet them, and find out.
Founder · Amsterdam · LinkedIn
Encounter was founded in 2026, after Raimo developed a model for change in dissipative systems that turned out to apply across very different domains. The practice is where that model meets real data and real questions.
Before Encounter, he co-founded Layar in 2009 — the world's first augmented-reality browser, named by TIME as one of "10 Startups That Will Change Your Life" and reaching 40 million users before being acquired by Blippar. He has since held C-suite positions at HealthTech scale-ups Pacmed and Incision, running real change programs from the inside.
He is the author of Riding Change, a book that maps change through four realms and sixteen challenges. Encounter is where the same map extends to cells, populations, and the other systems that share the shape.
Researchers who have a system they understand well and a question that has gone quiet. Clinical and translational teams in oncology and immunology, evolutionary biologists, trial sponsors whose biomarker programs aren't reading as expected, organisations whose change programs have stalled, builders of new technologies thinking about what their tools are doing to the cycles around them.
The thread is the same in each case: a cycle that should be completing, and isn't.
We bring a structural read on a system you know better than we do. We take the data and the question, locate where in the cycle the failure sits, and propose what would need to change for the system to complete. Often the intervention already exists and isn't being used. Often the experiment to confirm the read is small.
How an engagement actually unfolds is described on the method page.
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