My first project when I was employed at Antrop was about how to handle and present warning information in the future electronic health records. How could medical personnel see in a glance if a patient would need special treatment? We realised that the situations of use are quite different, from ordinary visits to the doctor [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Service design is a rapidly growing area that today gets a lot of the attention concerning value creation and cross collaboration. And design. Which is good. In area after area, the potential in developing things and expressions that people actually want, as well as the need of collaboration between competencies in order to create that [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]