Archive for the 'Expressions' Category

For a long time I thought it was sad that I could not use my Rotring 600 fountain pen more than I did. It would always dry out between times of use. I have simply never been a fountain pen guy. At the same time the plastic quality of my favourite writing and sketching instrument, [...]

This is a wall outside a school on the island of Formentera, in Spain. Obviously the values of the school are expressed with nonverbal graphics. Obviously the kids can get the message from the first day, long before they can read.
But this form of expression has many other advantages. It’s concise, takes little space, is [...]

Well….

I have always wondered what goes on in the minds of the people that design caravans and motor homes. Especially the graphics which form a genre of its own. Visiting a fair for these vehicles gave a lot of interesting impressions, but ended in more new questions than answers.
What’s the point of the stripe above? [...]

For example putting the source of heating where the people are. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; not part of the exhibition.

On Januari 25th, the “un-conference” Internet Discovery Day was organised by Grädde (Cream), a Stockholm based investmet company. Anyone with a business idea could take a section of brown paper and market their idea to venture capitalists, suppliers or potential partners.
It was interesting to see how the simplicity of the brown paper postings made the [...]

My favourite of japanese car manufacturers, Subaru, is currently running a wonderful viral campaign where they present the fictive “Mediocrity 2011″. Subaru intends to market itself as the Japanese car manufacturer with integrity, that sticks out. You may argue on the exterior expression of Subaru’s, but as a whole they are quite different with rumbling [...]

Many times have I been defending the practice of marketing among people who think of it as tricking people into buying what they don’t need and want. Today’s form of marketing, that I represent, is rather about matching needs, demands and offerings, while taking attitudes and awareness into account. You can make people aware of [...]

Winter has struck Sweden harder than in many years and of course the railroad companies, working under SJ, Swedish Railroads, get a lot of attention. Will they cope with the upcoming weather conditions or will we face the same disastrous delays as last year?
This week the state owned real estate company Jernhusen, owning the Swedish [...]

These are barley grains, from which you make malt and in turn beer or whisky. They come from the exposition at the Guinness brewery in Dublin, “The Guinness Storehouse”.

I guess that if you were to visit the Guinness factory some 20 years ago, you would probably be led through the factory in a group. Your [...]

Some time ago I checked in for a flight at one of the terminals of Arlanda airport, and I was confronted with this peculiar thing. A small piece of (maybe bullet-proof) glass separating the customer and the staff.

I found two things interesting about this. Firstly I wonder what went on in the minds of the [...]

Some things are so complicated that you cannot understand how they could be so just through ignorance or negligence. The complexity seems to be there by design. Like bank notes, old style airline tickets, the table of contents of medicine or the back of a PC. When discussing examples of this approach, a friend of [...]

In the daily life you don’t think so much about the origin of things. And at least myself I usually regard vegetables as something “real” that comes from “nature”, not as something that has been made up or “designed”.
Last night I saw Jimmy Doherty’s tv programme about genetically modified food, about how the global food [...]

I am now officially open for business. My objective is to make companies and their offerings more competitive through innovation based on inspiring customer/consumer/user insights. Primary tools will be persona- and scenario methods, sensemaking and creative prototyping together with classic and new strategy development methods.
The picture shows a traditional Swedish kiosk (newsstand/sweetstall) which has transformed [...]

We would understand anyway.

When the queuing time is 2,5 hours (early May, on a weekday) or more for the larger pavilions it’s an interesting alternative to visit several small pavilions and get in touch with countries you have little access to otherwise.

This is the queue to the pavilion of Saudi Arabia.
To see some highlights from big and small [...]

Even if you don’t visit one single pavilion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai, only the infrastructure and constructions around them make a fantastic experience. Just the number of flags near the entrance is breathtaking. These are 189 national flags and 57 international organization flags. The whole area, with all its components is an experience in [...]

Just watching all the world expo pavilions from the outside is a great experience. When you enter, often after a long time of queuing, you will find various expositions which can vary in quality just as any expositions.
You may conclude the types of pavilions like this:

In some cases you get a great experience of the [...]

The theme for the Swedish pavillion at Expo 2010 in Shanghai is “Spirit of Innovation”.

The exposition relates to the overall theme of Expo 2010, “Better city, better life”, discussing the cityscape as well as the Swedish approach to tradition. See more pictures here.
Innovation seems to be on everybody’s lips right now. No one is happier [...]

The world expo of 2010 in Shanghai has only been open for a week. I thought it would be a good idea to come here while everything is fresh and while the weather is not too hot. Yesterday it was raining, today the weather was fine. Those who visit later on may have the benefit [...]

My first impression of Shanghai, and China, is friendly and efficient. Like the Maglev train from the airport which reaches 431 km/h before it has to slow down again.

With buttons ranging from sad face to happy face you can rate your experience of the passport control officer. Signage is clear and evident, complemented with English. [...]

Flying with Turkish Airlines, Stockholm-Shanghai via Istanbul, I thought it would be a good occasion to ask for a real raki. To have some local benefit of the detour. And they gave me this: one glass with raki, one glass with mineral water and one glass of ice. As in many countries in the mediterranean [...]

Once in a while I have wondered about where that red dot, generally seen near surfaces of matte black, comes from.
Richard Sapper has put the red dot on many designs like the Tizio lamp and the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad laptop computers with their red pointing device, “Trackpoint”. The latter has become such an icon that there [...]

This Monday I attended the Visual Forum 2010 in Norrköping, co-located with the EuroGraphics 2010 conference. There seems to be a growing interest in visualization, and specifically in Norrköping they are just about to open the Norrköping Visualization Center.
With visualization as a theme you might expect a lot of designers and communication people [...]

The video has now been published on YouTube.
To see my talk at TEDxNorrmalm, 17th of april 2010, click the image or this link.
Welcome!

Some time ago I came across the manual for the original Macintosh. It’s quite fascinating.
When you open it, it feels almost a bit surreal. A bit like watching Teletubbies, the TV-show made for 2-3 year olds. Why? Because it explains things we all know by heart since a long time ago, as something completely new. [...]

This picture was taken in the mens’ room in a very large restaurant in Germany.

What it is? It is practically a toilet bowl at washbasin height. What it is used for? Well what do you think? In a restaurant with hundreds of seats, where people endulge in the wonderful german beer and rich foods, surely [...]

One of mans greatest inventions is the bicycle. They say that a human being on a bicycle is the most energy efficient form of transport (in relation to weight) on earth. On the other end of the scale you find some insects.
When I was a kid, a bicycle with more than three gears was a [...]

One of the stories in my TEDx talk was from a vacation in Croatia. I had some “house red wine” with my dinner one night and it was so good that I asked what kind of wine it was.
“- It’s house red wine.”
“- Yes, but I mean, what kind is it?”
“- No, we make it [...]

My talk was basically about my experiences from several creative areas, and the pattern I have seen when putting these on top of each other. Instead of a PowerPoint I used the blue and red glove so that the audience could follow the idea and make up their own minds on the pattern I am [...]

Twenty years ago there was a tea and coffee store in the block where I was living, and what always struck me when visiting it was that there was no particular smell of coffee in the shop. Today this would of course be impossible; a well dosed smell of coffee is expected [...]

Food is both survival and experience, depending on situation. It also reflects our attitudes in general.
The hotdog is definitely a child of its era, industrialism and modernism. Easy to grab and eat on the go, rational, practical and functional. Perfect for its context, where people would no more gather in families for the daily lunch [...]

Around the 80’s a new style emerged in product design, furniture and architecture. One of the leaders was the Memphis group, with Ettore Sottsass. Simple things like a piece of furniture having several colours were quite new at the time. The objects and buildings clearly broke with the modernistic tradition and started to mix style [...]

In the old world things would not change so quickly. Change was predictable. You could extrapolate the current conditions and get an idea of the future. To some extent you can today also, but in some areas that kind of linear predictions can be quite risky! Apart from all the physical uncertainties you also find [...]

Once upon a time, the signs around us referred to known things like natural phenomena. And symbols were given specific things. Today it has become much more complicated, but also more interesting. When we dress in the morning we choose attributes, statements and stories for ourselves and others to see.
Symbols and other signs not only [...]

In the 80’s, the largest milk producer in Sweden – Arla – was facing a decline in milk drinking. From being a standard drink at all meals, milk had started to be considered fattening and was now losing market share to mineral waters etc. Especially in restaurants this was evident – people were drinking other [...]

The first Sony Walkman, introduced in 1979, was a completely new and different product even though all its components had already existed in other products. There had been stereo heads before, but never in a pocket tape recorder. And so on.
The innovation was based on ideas of human behaviour, and re-arrangement of technologies, rather than [...]

Last autumn I went on a train trip through Great Britain, from north to south. On this beautiful trip I saw several times, across the country, pubs being left when their surroundings had changed. The whole block may have been torn down to the ground, but the pub stays. If not large industrial or office [...]

Some time ago I decided to buy a new camera, and suddenly I found myself in a private badge engineering project. And of course it turned out that changing the logo had a good effect in itself, but only after adding a couple of other elements the experience was complete.
The feeling you have for your [...]

Branding is not just about the logotype. Not even the logotype is just about the logotype. That’s what every branding expert will tell you. And they’re right!
But still, once you have managed to build a certain image and confidence, it is striking how strong the effect can be in changing both expectations and experience. Only [...]

I have always thought there is something strange about the concept of “adding value”. Which is frustrating as that is basically what I try to do in my work. I think the problem is that “adding value” has a linear touch to it, like if some part of somethings value was already there by itself. [...]

The shift from modernistic to post-modern, physical to mental, basic to added value can be seen in big and small. What’s interesting is how this shift of focus is scattered around all possible areas, taking place at different times. Many areas are still in the modernistic, physical, basic stage, and will still be for some [...]

Even in the major world conflicts you can see how focus has shifted from physical to mental. If you simplify this vast and complex subject into four images you may see this pattern:

World War 1: Basically traditional warfare man-to-man in the fields.
World War 2: Modernistic, industrialistic warfare added the use of not only all the [...]

Can something just be “beautiful” in itself? Looking for examples I find my turntable below. But then I realise that the consequences of this product design were more interesting than that. The beauty is not only in its minimalistic brushed metal shapes, but also in its statement towards the ordinary.
Basically, the traditional modernistic approach to [...]

Once there was basically just one model of telephone in Sweden, as in many other countries. One single model should fit all environments. They were owned by the telecom authorities. Old phones were recycled. Telephones were infrastructure, like electricity, running water and heating. A fascinating design task, quite different from todays context. In all a [...]

Design often deals with two parallel aspects: making things more obvious and making things more attractive and interesting. For a true modernist the choice is simple: always aim for maximum clarity and remove everything else. And there are so many areas which still have a long way to go before reaching basic acceptable level of [...]

A few years ago I made these candleholders by cutting off a pair of boat horns. When I started using them I was surprised by the strong formal effect of the candle holders being flush with the candles themselves. I think it’s a good example of how the effect of a certain feature often doesn’t [...]

During my time as a guest researcher at KTH/CID* I led a project where we imagined future use of IT in a social context. Will interactive television affect future sitting room design, was one of our research questions.
To visualise one of our conclusions, that new communication channels seldom replace but rather complement others, we made [...]

When I was a design student in the 80’s, “styling” was a bad word. Any element of a design that was not motivated by technical or practical functionality, or perhaps support to practically understanding the product, was dismissed as “styling”. The expressions should be based on these aspects, clad in harmonious shapes. But if these [...]

Architecture is one of the areas where “postmodern” is referred to as a special style in the 1980’s, which makes the postmodern discussion a bit tricky.
Sweden was one of the leading countries in early modernistic architecture. Functionalism was introduced at the Stockholm Exhibition in 1930. It went very well together with the upcoming creation of [...]

Jacob Jensen, creator of the design language that made Bang&Olufsen world famous in the 60’s, also designed this fruit plate. Well, in a way.

Jensen developed his linear and modernistic design language during the 60’s. The design was based on great attention to choice of materials, surfaces and graphic design, and it did not look like [...]

Let’s start with four examples, from left to right:

The last edition of the Olympus XA camera (XA4). At its launch in 1979 the XA was the first quality camera made of plastic, which was a sensation. Shape, choice of plastics and surface treatments, and graphics made this a not at all “cheap” product with technical [...]

Since a long time, science knows that placebo is over 50% of the effect of medicines and drugs, including coffee. Still most products in this area rely on chemical performance.
This is my first example of how many product areas develop: initially focus on physical performance, then presentation and handling and after that experience and [...]