“HAPPY PEOPLE TELLING STORIES,” OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Jan Egil & Stefan Dahlkvist, Moods of Norway; Norway

Moods of Norway began in Honolulu, Hawaii as an after-party idea between the company’s two designers Simen Staalnacke and Peder Børresen. Simen and Peder wanted to tell stories from Norway and make clothes for different moods, which is why every Moods of Norway item has a small Norwegian detail or twist to it.
Jan Egil grew up in Stryn, Norway and established his first business at 16, a night club in the Norwegian country side. At 36, he is co-founder and financial director of moods of Norway, handling the daily operations of this lifestyle design brand, and responsible for drawing the line between art and commercial products. Egil also works with the design process and to help bring new Moods of Norway concepts/product categories to the world.
With a Bachelor of Communications from Göteborg University in Sweden, Stefan Dahlkvist is the international sales manager for Moods of Norway and is also active in the concept development/design of the brand. At 34, he works closely with the company’s sales agents in Japan, Spain, Benelux, Germany, Scandinavia, Iceland and USA. Together with the company’s design duo, Dahlkvist forms new collections to fit under the moods of Norway concept umbrella, and is also involved with shaping new product categories.

Returning to the country known for polar bears and expensive gasoline, the designer duo drew their lines for the coming collections. The Moods Of Norway brand has its headquarters and showroom in the town of Stryn (population 5750), a place known for glaciers, salmon fishing and one newly-opened escalator.
Little Moods of Norway has been operating on the international fashion dance floor for just six years now, but the philosophy is still the same. Their main goal, besides making their grandmothers happy, is to make happy cloths for happy people around the world.
What role does design play in creating a strong and effective fashion/clothing experience? Behind the brand is an international lifestyle design concept that combines products with a twist of Norwegian history, culture, heritage and tradition. Nature – and the very special Norwegian natural environment – plays a big part in the brand identity and ultimate brand experience.
As a lifestyle clothing/fashion brand, it plays on – celebrates – international travel, a love of colourful play and fun, board sports and music in their clothing, shoes, cosmetics, food, spirits, hotels and more. Moods of Norway creates consumer experiences with hangtags in the linings, with true stories and statistical details, through concepts with (happy) thoughts in mind. To borrow a neighbouring Swedish company’s tag-line, Moods Of Norway is serious fun.

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here

“DESIGN AS ESSENCE OF ENTERPRISE,” OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Jakob Odgaard, Bang & Olufsen, Denmark

Jakob Odgaard is Managing Director of Bang & Olufsen’s Expansion Markets division. From the company’s headquarters in Struer, Denmark, he and his team support an extensive dealer network covering some 40 countries, including Russia, the Middle East, Latin America and India among others.
Odgaard has been 13 years with Bang & Olufsen, with particular expertise in Expansion Markets. He began his career as a consultant with the Carl Bro Group, one of the largest players in the European consultancy market, providing management and strategic counsel to companies.
Today Odgaard also heads Bang & Olufsen Enterprise, a leading provider of custom AV installations to luxury hotels and condominiums, and most recently, took on the role of heading the company’s marketing division, setting the strategic direction for the brand globally.

Founded in 1925 in Struer, Denmark, Bang & Olufsen is world renowned for its distinctive range of quality consumer electronic products including televisions, music systems, loudspeakers, telephones and multimedia products which are sold in 60 countries around the world.
Bang & Olufsen is unique as a brand that bridges the home electronics and lifestyle-luxury categories. The company prides itself on its idea-based products that combine technological excellence with emotional appeal. Many of these products hold places of honour in the permanent collections of the world’s greatest art museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
To create products with appearance and functionality the company has evolved its unique design and development processes that give designers free reign to create new products which, at the same time, challenge engineers to find a way to manufacture them.
Starting out as the vision of two enterprising young men and their first creation, the ‘Eliminator’, the company’s design process and the evolution of its distinctive product range make it a unique design- and experience-driven enterprise.

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here

“OBJECTS AND USERS: DEMANDING INTERACTION,” OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Paul Cocksedge, designer, Paul Cocksedge Studio, UK

Paul Cocksedge Studio is the well-known design practice of partners designer Paul Cocksedge and manager Joana Pinho. Based in London, it undertakes in-house design, accepts commissions and occasional consultancy work for an array of clients and sectors. Production ranges from bespoke manufacturing to licensing technologies. The Studio continues to build a strong portfolio of pieces and projects, united by the studio’s individual approach to design.
Studying under Ron Arad at the Royal College of Art, Cocksedge was introduced to Issey Miyake and Ingo Maurer, both of whom staged early exhibitions of his work. With his own show at Milan Design Week 2003 together with his ‘NeON’ lamp winning the Bombay Sapphire Prize, he founded the Studio near London Fields.
Cocksedge now lectures in turn and has exhibited around the world, and is a member of the 100% Design event (London) advisory panel. The studio’s client roster includes London Design Museum, Droog Design, Museum of Arts and Design, Swarovski, The Bombay Sapphire Foundation, Trussardi Spa, and the Victoria & Albert Museum (permanent collection).

The relationship between objects and their users is present in many of Paul Cocksedge’s pieces, playing a central part from the inspiration stage through to the final design and execution outcome, paying particular attention to the materials, form and technologies employed.
As regards function, Paul was initially drawn to light, where he experienced a feeling of emancipation from the constraints of gravity. These suspended works include ‘Styrene’, ‘NeON’, ‘Crystalized’, ‘Sapphire Light’, ‘Veil’, ad even ‘Light as Air’, where light is visible in the lower setting yet its focus is upward.
He also employs a certain sense of tension, favouring work that simultaneously is what it is and yet ought not to be. His “logically constructed illogical constructs” might be ‘Watt?’, illuminated by the stroke of a pencil; the ‘Bulb’, activated with a fresh flower; ‘NeON’ fired by single-core cabling; ‘Pole’, with its bright light without heat; and both ‘Private View’ and ‘Veil’, where everything is invisible to the eye, naked or direct respectively.
His ‘The Wellcome Trust Window’ on the Euston Road, ‘Private View’ and ‘Veil’ are among recent installations both lasting and fleeting; for the German Financial Times he recently produced festive wrapping paper. His aesthetically compelling designs continue to instil a sense of wonder, quietly demanding interaction and a place somewhere in our thoughts.

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here

Carl William Kerchmar – Month of Design conference moderator

The economic presence of the experience economy is here. The Netherlands
have 300 free-time activities per year, about 5 - 6 per week, 16 euro per
activity at 77 billion euros annually and representing 25% of the household budget. The free-time market is 6x bigger than the vacation market and the quantity of festivals has grown by 800% before the turn of

the millennium and 900% in the number of visitors. The future of brands will depend on the dialogue between product and consumer; experience is a way to foster that relationship where designing space will be the platform. PORTAL TO YOUR DREAMS is a creative visualization / economic strategies company that uses the tool of Scenario Planning and the power of universal trend stories + tailorised trend applications to help businesses innovate and better understand the consumer spirit. Its approach is holistic, to say the least: It truly combines the creative and the commercial and ensures that human passions work for business – rather than the other way round. Current projects PORTAL is involved with include sponsorship, culinary design and official photography for Formula Zero who in August 2008 successfully held the world’s first ever hydrogen fuelled motor race in Europe; the Green project Tree Life, a new retail design campaign for the music and games industries and educational paths into Imagineering as a business innovation tool, amongst others. Within all of these project experience has and continues to be a driving element in today’s economy. Experience has become in-rooted in the design logic of space and is the fundamental way consumers have a dialogue with brands.

BIOGRAPHY:

Carl William Kerchmar is a NC State University educated economist. He left the US to gain a Master’s in European Urban Cultures in Holland, Finland, Belgium and UK as well as studying at the prestigious Artemis Styling Academy in Amsterdam. Before setting up PORTAL, he worked as a new media researcher at Erasmus University’s Brain Park, styled culinary events through NK Concepts, ran an art studio in Amsterdam and consulted for clients ranging from the music and fashion industries to insurance companies.

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here

“ENRICHING EXPERIENCE THROUGH STRATEGIC DESIGN”, OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Kim Aalto, Mozo, Finland

Kim Aalto is director in charge of brand & marketing solutions for international clients and their brand development with design at Mozo Oy. Mozo is a creative marketing & design agency that innovates, designs and manufactures solutions that communicate and sell brands.
He has long strategic, conceptual and managerial experience in brand management, brand building & development (both domestic & international brands), sales & marketing, strategic planning, and digital marketing (internet & mobile), design. Previously he served as Planning Director at the McCann Helsinki advertising agency in charge of strategic brand and marketing planning; as well as Crossmedia Planner at TBWA/PHS, Helsinki.

Brand building is all about managing brand experiences and building positive brand images. Positive brand images encourage interaction and involvement with the brand. Each interaction becomes an experience. Positive experience leads to more interaction and involvement with the brand. Strong and trusted brands make people spend more, use more and do more with the brand. This way investments in brand building pay themselves back.
Everything the brand does communicates, and everywhere it’s present matters. Design plays an essential role in brand building: it can create positive impact for a brand, it can change how new consumers perceive the brand or change the perception of the brand on new markets; moreover it helps, indeed is key, to delivering the brand message and communicating the brand promise.
Design should always be based on the brand. Brand-centric design consists of Design Philosophy & Design Language. Where Design Philosophy focuses on the physical, rational and emotional properties of the brand, Design Language concentrates on shape & form, graphic style, materials & finishes, colour and illumination specifically suited to the brand. If sustainability or ecology are important, key values for the brand, they should be clearly communicated by the Design Language used.
Aalto points to a number of key components in the process of strategic design, which include looking further in the initial observation process, which must also include the both distribution and the actual end-consumer. In exploring possibilities, the approach should be disruptive and creative, the solution relevant and highly-specific to the brand.

more: http://mozo.fi/

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here

“EMERGENT TRANSPARENCY VIA EXPERIENCE”, OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Enrique Limon, LimonLab Design USA

LimonLab Design, New York, is a newly-established (2005) urban laboratory dedicated to the advancement of architectural, urban and interior design. Rick Limon has also taught at the Pratt lnstitute School of Architecture, Brooklyn, NY as visiting assistant professor of architecture in comprehensive design studio on Housing. He’s currently teaching second year architectural design with an emphasis on the design of a Kindergarten and an urban library.
Current LimonLab projects include: Prototype for a Soccer park which could be implemented in 200 locations throughout the U.S., a glass beach-house on Fire lsland, NY, a night club in central Philadelphia, a theater renovation for the New School in NYC, two apartments in Miami Florida, a guesthouse in Waialua, Hawaii, and an auditorium building for the Sereclipi School in Kenya.

Emergent Transparency departs from the modernists’ argument of Robert Slusky and Colin Rowe’s Literal and Phenomenal transparency as pictorial in terms of invoking a two-dimensional phenomenology that fixed the observer in a position on axis with the plane of the façade as if viewing a painting and in line with but in contrast to Sigfried Giedion and Lazlo Maholy Nagy’s idea of transparency based on a phenomenology of spatial perceptions.
For Maholy Nagy and Giedion this was a four-dimensional transparency in which the boundaries between inside and outside, subject and object, were dissolved for an observer assumed to be moving freely in space and time. Enrique Limon argues that Emergent Transparency can be defined three dimensionally through “experience”. Limon suggests that the body experiences real time three-dimensional architectural space through the transverse of spatial entities no longer through perspective and or pictorial suggestions.
This rather complex argument is applied and worked through in various projects from Limon’s architectural Laboratory in New York City, which include a master plan for Seoul, Korea, a competition entry for Bodo, Norway, an auditorium building for a school in Kenya, both a loft and a retail component in NYC, and a chandelier.
More: www.limonlab.cam

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here

“THE SPEED OF INNOVATION: IMPACTING THE CREATIVE PROCESSES”, OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Frederik Andersen (Denmark), Story Worldwide (London), UK

Frederik Andersen recently moved to work as a creative in London, implementing the Story Worldwide post-advertising mantra in some of the most interesting businesses and brands across Europe.
He came to Story Worldwide from the Copenhagen-based Goodmorning Technology, a creative agency specialising in identity programmes, product design, packaging design and digital interaction, and helping companies achieve success through design.
When not working for their cross-sector and extensive list of clients that included Bang and Olufson, Aztra Zeneca, Fritz Hansen, Widex and Louis Poulsen, Andersen worked with solving design-strategic issues.
He won the Danish Design Prize in the category of Future Products with a software project that digitises architecture processes, and has also pioneered digital photo and online entertainment services as a designer and information architect.

In his ongoing work with solving design-strategic issues, Andersen asks how it is that innovation and speed are often perceived as barriers when creating new value for businesses. Further, he examines how they can be used to our best advantage, and how timely, strategic design can help unfold an organisation’s identity.
“All around us, we see cutting edge products that change our mindset just by using them,” says the 34 year old Danish designer now working as a creative director in London. “It appears that these products came out of nowhere, seemingly overnight, and took the market by storm. In reality, many of these products have a history of 10 – 15 years of development from invention to the final-product stage. If you can synthesise part of this relatively slow process, you can create something extremely valuable.”
In one instance, Andersen demonstrated this conviction with work at the Goodmorning Technology design company, where his work saved a business an eight figure sum by changing their packaging design; he also increased sales by 30% for another client by revitalising a physical product design.

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here

“HUMAN NATURE”, OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Victor Gerardo Martinez, Vgmdesign, Mexico

Victor Martinez started his professional experience collaborating in transportation design. He has worked in the USA, Mexico and Italy working on projects for companies like Ford, Audi, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Italdesign Giugiaro and Ferrari among others.
In 2004 he founded Vgmdesign. He is also a teacher at the Tecnologico de Monterrey College at the Industrial Design School, in Mexico, where he runs the laboratory of research on new biodegradable materials based in natural fibers. Among other awards he won a Red Dot in 2007 and participated with LED in the Salone Satellite 2008, Milan, Italy and the International Furniture Fair of Valencia, Spain in 2007.
Vgmdesign is an innovation consultancy, that believes that design does not describe exactly what nowadays we do for work. They analyze, imagine, search, and discuss new ways of creating progress within societies where products are just one part of a bigger concept.

Today, claims Martinez, our own “human nature” restricts us from achieving great things; our greed, our short-term vision and inattention to the consequences of our simplest actions are our greatest challenges.
Industrial designers have a big role in this process, in the products that are made and the services created. Most of the these don’t really contribute to a better quality of life, social equity or increased knowledge, values we ought to be pursuing. Instead it’s about raising false expectations and cultivating needs and feelings that can’t or shouldn’t be satisfied by objects. Private property and consumerism are transforming people into buying machines, instead of subjects pursuing happiness and well-being.
Designers can offer far more than just solutions in the form of products: in the future we will see how using “experience” as a holistic concept that integrates, science, technology, economics, raw materials, cultural habits, manufacturers, and disposal can transform our presently unsustainable consumerist structure.
The first basic step we can use as an approach is the feeling created when using an object; or looking backward, the feelings we want to create and propose a product or service to which you can apply it.
One simple example is the footrest designed together with his colleagues at G-LED. Among a long list of feelings and sensations they drew up was the special feeling of grass beneath bare feet – outdoors, holidays, peace and relaxation. Later they developed a second position for this same smart office footrest which would warm one’s feet in winter.
Similarly, the car’s steering wheel has remained roughly the same for 100 years, yet few have ever considered whether the interface is actually correct for basic human physiology. After some time thinking he came up with the Noloos, a steering wheel that in fact is not a wheel, which offers a comfort and practicality conventional, “unthinking” wheels simply can’t.

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here

“THE CITY CENTRE EXPERIENCE”, OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
David Charles Cash, UK; International Development Director, BDP

David Cash joined BDP in 1980, and took over leadership of BDP Manchester Office in May 1994 and of BDP North in July 2000, comprised of four offices with 350 staff. In July 2008 he became Director of International Development responsible for leading BDP’s strategy to become a major international design organisation through the securing of new projects around the world and establishing a network of international offices.
BDP works across many sectors – retail, urbanism, transport, workplace, healthcare, education, housing, leisure and heritage. Their many projects include Täby Centrum, Stockholm, Meriadeck Centre, Bordeaux; Liverpool One; Piccadilly Station Refurbishment, Manchester; and the Vasco da Gama Centre, Lisbon.

The town or city centre and in particular its shopping area is usually a reliable measure of the vibrancy of the wider community. In short, what we think of a town is often based on how we assess its shopping centre.
Some towns in decline have been able to reverse their fortunes through a well designed central area redevelopment project whilst others might not have been so successful. Indeed, some poorly designed centres have greatly damaged the historic heart of a community which may have evolved incrementally over many centuries.
With this in mind, Cash offers, it is important to analyse the essential ingredients which characterise the best central area redevelopment projects using examples based on his almost 30 years of experience working in the sector.
As he points out – and develops both in talks and in practice, the design of the town centre shopping experience is a complex matter involving the resolution of many different factors and interests: sustainability and balance with nature; flexibility for change; artwork; lighting;; servicing and logistics; parking; multiple levels; architecture and landmark buildings; local identity and character; diversity and mix of uses; covered or open?; maximisation of pedestrian flows and ease of movement; permeability; street pattern; public realm; continuity and enclosure.
In addition, good redevelopment invariably needs close co-operation between the public and private sectors. For these reasons it can be a long drawn-out process with the average total time for a development being at least ten years. However whilst this might seem a long time with a great deal of work needing to be undertaken, it’s well worth it, Cash maintains, and is one of the most satisfying exercises a designer can undertake.

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here

“MAKE IT DIFFERENT: FIVE DESIGN TRENDS FOR THE FUTURE,” OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
David Carlson, founder, David Report & Designboost, Sweden

David Carlson, founder of David Report, has been working with design as a competitive weapon for twenty years. With design as an added value David helps his assigners create attractive brands ready for the challenges of the future. His assigners include Absolut, Level Vodka and Sony Ericsson.
He is also the founder of the furniture brand David Design, the lifestyle shop Carlson Ahnell and the knowledge company Designboost. Now and then he also serves as moderator and writes chronicles and debate articles. He edits and does the graphic design for a nature preservation organisation magazine.
Carlson regularly lectures on trends concerning design, entrepreneurship, communication and brand development.

Today, Carlsson argues, most companies understand that the products of their competitors have the same technology, price, performance and functions. It’s more or less only the brand and the design that separates them. This then makes it crucial to have an open mind towards the future, to understand the market and its need states.
This involves developing aesthetically-engaging and life-enriching products that talk both to our hearts and to our brains – “feel good” products so to speak. It’s a safe way forward for companies that would like to develop a friendly relationship with their clients and, at the same time, earn lasting brand loyalty.
Carlson talks about the importance of being culturally connected, and having and using knowledge in creating humanistic experiences. He sees it’s about storytelling and how to build factors in that attract consumers; to use design as a tool and channel of communication. Most important is the need to differentiate; to find the white spots or the blue ocean or whatever we might want to call it, to do it your own way.
His approach to design as an experience goes through five different design trends for the future, all based on both micro and macro research made for the trend report David Report.

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here

“WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE, WHEN CHANGE IS THE ONLY THING THAT IS CONSTANT”, OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Christoph Boeninger, Founder/Designer, brains4design, Germany

Early in his career, Christoph Boeninger put together a design department for Siemens USA. Later he managed several Siemens design organisations until 2006, when he left Siemens to co-found brains4design in Munich. Today Boeninger works in furniture design. Various of his designs are in the permanent collections of museums in Europe and the USA, like the Aluminium Soest stool, the patented SAX-table for ClassiCon, and the A-bowl and table #28, both of which can be seen at MoMA in New York. He also lectures at various universities and serves as curator of the Haniel Foundation.
One of the major changes over the coming decades, Boeninger asserts, will be the facing of ever-scarcer resources and rising energy prices. Fundamental changes will affect people as individuals and as a society as a whole. And experience shows that the sooner we react to them, the more alternatives we might have, says Boeninger.
He offers that designers could help in creating these alternatives, first as scenarios to help people understand how these changes will affect them and what options they have. This, he says, will require experience and bold new thinking at the same time to create these scenarios.
But perhaps the biggest task is to overcome our experiences, he suggests, to “leave them behind and to reinvent ourselves, stepping into new territory? In this context design has to become political again. Designers must position themselves in the political discussion and address relevant topics.”
A fictive computer game should be designed to eliminate our mental roadblocks, he offers. The game, called “melt!” (image #1), is about controlling a nuclear power plant, similar to gaming software like autopilot (image #2). He maintains a flight simulator is not so different from controlling a power plant – the control engineering of both systems depends solely on physical parameters and interactive communication through a logical and intuitive MMI (image #3).
Playing “melt!” should create awareness for the complexity of nuclear technology without playing down any risks. Thus “melt!” should start a non-political discussion about how technological innovation and design can improve the transparency and security of nuclear power in order to regain trust. “melt!” should also create awareness among designers that design is not just a discipline, castrated by industry and solely adding hollow aesthetics along its marketing-mix strategy.

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here

“SILENT DESIGN”, OCT 23-24, LJUBLJANA
Frans Joziasse, PARK Advanced Design Management, Germany

Frans Joziasse is one of the two founding partners of PARK (1998), an international network of strategic design management consultancies that works with clients like Audi, LEGO, Roca, Siemens, Lafarge, Johnson Controls, Hyundai & KIA Motors, Bugaboo, Amsterdam Airport and Reckitt Benckiser.
He holds an MBA in design management from the University of Westminster (London) and lectures/teaches at several universities in Europe and the US and at the Conferences of the Design Management Institute on strategic design management issues.
He founded PARK in 1998. Joziasse has been cited for numerous awards for design excellence by the Gute Industrie Form in Hanover (Germany). In 2003, he developed the module ‘strategic design management’ for the MA design management at the INHOLLAND University (taken over by EURIB at the Erasmus University in 2005), in Rotterdam, where he continues to teach the module.

Design has developed into a mature profession and industry over the last 20 years. Globally the investment of companies in designers has dramatically grown. Companies like P&G have a few hundred design managers in order to manage their design projects with externals, while Samsung has 500 designers or so to boost the brand image and power up their innovation levels. Haier the Chinese multi-national has just opened design and research centres in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. Also the Indian conglomerate Tata has just communicated their plan to open design offices with 100 or more designers in Europe (Germany and UK).
The professionalization goes hand in hand with management practices, a part that is not really visible to the outside world. A company with successful designs is a company with successful design processes, said Peter Gorb already back in the 1980s.
So what, he asks, do these management practices look like? How are they linked with the long term direction of companies and how are they integrated in the other business processes? And how are other departments of companies involved? What are the main ingredients of what Joziasse calls silent design?
Joziasse offers three key points of departure: having a strong mission and vision; having processes in place; having the right culture and organisational alignment. On the first of these he points to the Dutch electronics giant Philips, long a champion of design, he maintains, with a vision that is strongly focused on the consumer, on society and the environment we live in. He maintains that innovation should be managed as an intentional and disciplined, reliable and repeatable business process. And finally, he asserts that design is becoming increasingly a bridge between technology and consumers, and that to realise that bridge companies have to create the right culture and organisation around their design community. Therefore design has to think out of their design black-box, which means teaming up with their peers as well as with the consumer.

Back to Big Design Conference Programme
Month of Design Conference - register here