I remember being blown away by the aesthetics of surfing. This was in the post-90s era; everything had this fast, Y2K-like neon-turquoise-teal jazz look that you can only find on coffee cups and kitsch bus seat fabrics nowadays. Inspired by different surf brands that were around at the time, I designed a new logo for our local surf club at the age of 15, stumbling my way through the CorelDraw software that my father had installed on our family computer.

Throughout high school, I continued to do freelance work within branding and digital design and eventually moved to Berlin at the age of 20, working for a digital advertising agency with clients that included Red Bull and Nike. I later completed my undergrad in Design at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design and later, a master’s in Strategic Product Design at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Principles of design are changing. The other day, I was admiring the beauty of the classic Bialetti Moka Pot and its distinctive eight-faceted utilitarian design. It’s a perfect design; made from three simple parts, beautifully crafted to withstand the pressure inside the water tank and solely responsible for the domestication of espresso brewing for millions of people. Furthermore, its form has remained unchanged since it was designed almost one hundred years ago. Good design, like this, used to adhere to the principles of functionalism with form following function.

Over the last few decades, a lot of things have changed. Todays’ technology has allowed us to liberate the form from the function. I do not only see design as a tool for problem-solving but also as a tool for storytelling. We use form and materials to invoke a feeling of what a product is, where it belongs and what we want it to become. Rather than having "form follows function", we like to refer to our approach as "form follows feeling".

We often ask ourselves: What feeling should our designs evoke? The world has become a noisy place with a lot of visual and sensory pollution. I believe that the new luxury is going to be calmness; our homes and nature being the last refuge from the noise and interruptions of the world. You’d want to surround yourself with things that blend in without demanding excessive attention and instead making you feel at ease. In fact, design and architecture play important roles in ensuring the wellbeing of people as what we surround ourselves with and our environments have a direct impact on our biology.

We know this from the latest research in neuroscience, pioneered by the Arts + Minds Lab at Johns Hopkins University’s Brain Science Institute. It is something that all creatives have intuitively known since forever, but science has finally proven that good design does not only exist to serve some hedonistic purpose. We explored this with our exhibition, A Space for Being, during the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2019 in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University’s Arts + Mind Lab, Muuto and Reddymade Architecture. In an interactive installation, using cutting-edge wearable sensor technology, visitors could experience three different spatial experiences and measure which resonated with their bodies and made them feel at ease.

While we all respond differently to aesthetic experiences, I find that one thing is certain: Nobody wants to live in a spaceship and we see a need to change the course of things towards a future we actually want to spend the rest of our lives in.