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

We would understand anyway.

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!

Even though there was not an official theme for TEDx Norrmalm, there was definitely a common sector between the speakers. Danica Kragic, professor of Robotics and Computer Vision, talked about the work with robots and how they differ from human beings. ”Sensing is easy, perception is hard”.
Ulf Boman from Kairos Future talked about the future [...]

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 [...]

The good old product lifecycle model has been questioned, but I can’t help thinking that it is a good illustration to the shift of focus that we can see.
The model in brief: when a new offering is launched your first customers will be enthusiasts and after a while the so called “early adopters” will be [...]

By now I think that the idea of how the western world has moved from an industrial state into a post-industrial state, is rather accepted. There are plenty of interesting readings to be found on and off line. I will only refer to this briefly.
What actually interests me is how this model, this shift from [...]

I once saw a lecture by Nitin Nohria at Harvard on the subject of this headline. It was about research that he with colleagues had done on successful companies and their strategies. It cooked down to a few very simple rules, and if I were to condense them again, into one sentence, that would be [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Functionalism emerged in the 1930 as a reaction to the large number of low quality, often cheap copy products that had been pumped out by the growing industry since the late 19th century. Organisations like Swedish Slöjdföreningen and the Art and Crafts movement had promoted good examples and with the social and economic change, time [...]