Swiss designer Andreas Bhend is specialised in “hacking” IKEA furniture, for example the shelf above made from Frosta stools. Actually, since the 70’s IKEA has been encouraging people to modify their products or use them in another way than the obvious. For example a friend of mine uses a bookshelf as a coffee table, and [...]

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? [...]

Last friday Rósa Guðjónsdóttir defended her doctoral thesis Personas and Scenarios in Use. The thesis is based on professional experiences and the work in a European research project, Nepomuk.and it describes how personas were used as a tool for communication and acceptance in an organisation. You can find the thesis here.

So what’s “personas”? In short, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

A long time ago I took this picture, and I have used it many times since, discussing our biological fundament for how we perceive and consume. How humans in their natural environment spend a large part of the day chatting, thus stimulating their brains so that they can think fast when a lion shows up! [...]

Yesterday I went to TEDxHumlegården, one of the TEDx events in Stockholm this week. It was very inspiring, and how could it be otherwise including such titans as the always so engaging Klas Hallberg. marketing guru Stefan Engeseth (who dared to question Apple!) and Sigge Birkenfalk, who once taught me everything about strategic communication at [...]

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 [...]

In the old industrial context, there was less need for collaboration. You could develop a structural platform first, than have some “creatives” powder on some elements of beauty, experience and understanding.
Today, and tomorrow, those components are hard to separate, and competencies need to work together. You can more rarely separate one dimension from the others. [...]

If I were to choose one favourite TED talk, it would not be easy but finally I think it would have be this one: Jan Chipchase (March 2007). Jan Chipchase is hired by Nokia to travel around the world with his team, observe and document behaviour and cultural expressions as a basis for Nokias future [...]