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Have your cross-disciplinary research projects with the digital world, and your background in industrial design, led you to believe that there is such a thing as “Design Thinking” that can be applied widely outside the sphere of pure design?

“Design Thinking” was always part of the culture of design, long before the term became popularly known. Conducting and applying Design Thinking is a vital part of each design process: questioning the reality, solving “wicked” problems in a creative way and developing new ideas with uncommon approaches, beyond how a result should look. The “Human Centred Approach” is now common in all design disciplines. Designers learned and used these methods for decades before they became widely popular. Today, Design Thinking is to a certain extent a buzz-phrase as well as a promise for a simple way to be creative. The term and the methods are today used by business, engineering and other disciplines. But to be honest, the real Design Thinking skills are deeply rooted in the design disciplines and I suppose that Design Thinking will be further developed by designers.

To what extent are you inspired by competitiveness, or do you prefer a collegial environment in which you can seek encouragement or constructive criticism from your peers?

There are basically two types of designers: the “Author Designer”, similar to an artist, and the “Service Designer” as a service provider. While the Author Designer by definition tries to promote his or her name in close relation to the design work, the Service Designer as a person is often anonymous and works for enterprises largely in the background. In my work, design is always a team achievement, where competitiveness is part of the creative process — but always focused on the content rather than on the person.

If you work as a design agency, it is necessary that your company gets some attention, as it is for an author-designer. As a whole, yes I think that design discipline must constantly debate its approaches and benefits for the world in a holistic and cultural sense. What are we doing? For whom and in what quality? And it is not always the market that decides what is good or bad design. Design is also a culture, a heritage and, therefore, a critical, but nevertheless constructive peer discussion is necessary.