Owner, 22A Design Consulting | Fintech startup design lead |
Former design director at Paypal, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo!
Member since 2017
To me, Design is manifested in every activity I do. It articulates itself in the way I attack problems and tasks. Design is also an approach to creativity. In the collaboration between people. Between designers of things and its users. Between engineers, business developers and creatives.
Design is much more than the rational, logic development of products and services. It includes nodes of poetry, storytelling, visual approach, the creativity. It represents an ability to consciously evoke different thinking styles, convictions and behaviours in order to achieve different results.
The actual word “design” has changed to me over the years. In the beginning I saw it purely as being defined by creatively making and crafting of products. Over the years, it has taken on meanings within social interactions, collaboration between people and organisations, strategy development, user experience, storytelling and cultural aspects.
But all the time I come back to design as the art of creating and making real what could become and imagining and telling the world about alternative realities.
In a world where the rate of change is accelerating and the size of the problems incurred by the human species is becomes more serious, design represents a highly needed ability to craft relevant solutions to complex problems, infusing creativity and human aspects to problems that often evolved due to the lack of the above.
The ability to create powerful, systemic solutions that matter to people gives Design a huge relevance in the world today by guiding people, organisations, companies and nations.
Understanding that design is a broad, profound skill within the Danish cultural heritage helps us as a nation. It gives us a meaningful position in an accelerating crazy world as a benchmark that brings answers to some of the problems humanity faces.
Design is on a path from being a narrow “magic” tool mastered by a few practitioners and viewed upon as “dark art” and is to become one of the most important frameworks of the future, to be utilised by millions. The role of the designer therefore is to transform from being an individual design practitioner into being a facilitator of design for non-designers. This will bring much change to the design community. Healthy change.
Started out in the field of strategic product creation and quickly circled in on creative and collaborative innovation leadership, -practice and -methodology with a focus on design thinking and design culture. Working in large size teams and large size companies, a skill for bringing cross functional, broad groups of people together to develop breakthrough innovations within device design, user experience design and design strategy. Currently works in a multitude of complementary roles such as product lead in a startup, senior strategic consultant for large corporations and lecturing at design and business academies. Organisations served includes Nokia, Yahoo!, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Novo Nordisk, Lego and educational institutions include The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, KADK and University of Cranfield, UK.