I am committing the ultimate crime in the age of Google. I am changing my URL. All the links will be broken - I will go out of existence, web-vise. But I will be back from the new and better site.

Next & More is my personal platform for research and consulting. Today I am combining these two in an effort to explore design, and in the future I will seek out new clients and collaborators, as well as new research projects.

New site: www.nextandmore.com ;

New RSS feed: feed://http//nextandmore.com/feed/  

I have been interviewed for the Inform magazine -  the quaterly of Danish Designers. The focus was on Design's potential as a research discipline. Research-through-design is something I have been focused on during most of my research, and in my dissertation I tried to make a broad argument why it makes sense.

The Inform article tries to make a popular recap of this argument. Helle from Danish Designers have done a marvelous job with writing it together.

Possibly I can post a summary here later - maybe on the new site.

I have been interviewed to the yearly report from The Danish Design Research Center as well, but this is stil unpublished, so I will get back to you on that. 

The new site will contain all the stuff that have been available here on MVL.dk. mvl.dk will stay in function, but mainly as a mail-box for all the good people who have an mvl.dk-mail. 

The Interactive Spaces Research Center needs a new liason to the School of Architecture and assistant manager. Peter Krogh, who has been taking care of this so far has started in a new job of Innovation Manager at the Alexandra Institute. So I am stepping on to take over for Peter at Interactive Spaces.

This is a great job, and I am looking forward to starting in research again.

The talk was a summarry of the work I did in my PhD in order to explore and argue for the fact that design research - especially in a research-through-design persective - can be seen as a fully qualified and valid, academic, scientific form of research.

I had great fun actually writing this section last year and exploring all the nerdy philosophy-of-science readings I could find relating to design. Usually other PhD's hate this part of the dissertation, but I found it ot be almost relieving tension, as I found that it was EASY to argue for the fact that design research - and my little research project - was valid science.

I put the presentation on to Slideshare.net - hope it works.

The background for the article is the story of Michael Rasmussen the Danish cyclist who was kicked out of the Tour de France last month by his own team Rabobank. if you followed the race you know what I am talking about, and I you didn't the short explanation is that Michael Rasmussen was not found to be using doping like some of his competitors but since he was unable to unquestionably account for where he had been before the Tour, there was no trust in the public that he was playing ‘clean' and there was no trust in the professional field or in his team-management. The result is that what looked like a certain win became a complete crash, maybe even for Rasmussen's career.

My suggestion was then to change the name of the game and use a web2.0 strategy to rebuild trust and support from the public. If Rasmussen would share everything about his everyday life with the public in e.g. a blog, then we would all know that he is a good guy competing without doping. A lot of the problems for professional cycling right now is that the public does not trust them to compete fairly - without doping - and there is a code of secrecy within the field that enhances this distrust. But the vicious cycle of distrust can easily be broken by an overly generous view into the world. The barrier of closeness should be broken down and replaced by total transparency.

This same strategy goes for a much wider industry too. In the old days it was important to guard your secrets since they could be seen a weapons in the fight with your opponents. Today it is important to share what you know with the entire field of business because this is the best way to participate at the top of the game - and show that you are able to participate at the top. Furthermore it is also the best way we can evolve and survive as a collective field. Sharing the most knowledge gets us closer to the best solutions!

Read the article in today's paper (Saturday 04 August 2007) or the translated version after the ‘read more'

I am integrating as much as possible of my work in MVL into 3Part and all future projects and ongoing ideas that I have been developing in my network will be handled within the context of 3Part. 

So MVL becomes the base of my personal development of design thinking and the conceptual 'penthouse' or superstructure on top of my professional design work.

I have been asked to do lectures and maybe contribute to a few books on design thinking, and I am trying to get a publisher to go into a few books projects that I am proposing:

• A book on 'Designing Social Interaction' with the frameworks and experiences from my PhD research
• A book on Design Research and in particular 'research-through-design' which is a relatively new concept that could need a good, defining anthology for future reference or the developing field of design research
• Finally I am working on a book proposal on 'Integrating Design' - a perspective on how to see the different types of thinking in design as part of the same field

So MVL is now my personal think tank devoted to development of thoughts on design.

Following Buchanans four levels or placements of design you could say that I work in professional design a little with ‘symbols’ (graphic design) more with ‘things’ (product design) a lot with ‘actions’ (interaction design). And then in MVL I work with and develop ‘thought’ (systems design). This last placement is the most complex aspect of design and to me an integral part of how I explore and develop personally as a designer.

And people at Reboot seemed to be on a mission. The focus was on Social web and web 2.0 and what the current revolution is doing to our basic concept of being HUMAN.

I was invited by George Pór to help him develop and give a talk on Boosting our collective intelligence - developed to its final form with Yann Mauchamp too. To us designing for 'boosting' our collective intelligence means to be very conscious of how we are creating and facilitating social interaction to reach a peak collaboration. Our points were pretty well received and we are working now to make them shaper for next time.

To me collective intelligence is really at the root of what I am doing with Social Design and User Experience. I think that we are drawn towards these situations of increased capacity through collaboration as a natural drive. Collective intelligence is a complex issue to unfold and explore, and George Pór has been a thought leader on the subject for a quarter of a century. It is incredibly interesting to be able to collaborate with him and Yann in moving the edge of the concept as best we can. 

Image by Holger

However the way innovation was discussed was more like a tapable resource than an attitude or activity. Innovation was not seen as a scarce resource as people working in different public organizations deliver many different ideas for innovations at a many different levels. As a union representative stated ‘innovation on the floor can be a new ideas of where to place the buckets for cleaning the floor’ and surely this type of employee-oriented innovation is both relevant to focus on and able to save money in production costs. On the other end of the scale SKAT – our IRS – has created web-based services that make it so much easier to pay your taxes (with a smile). The newest example of IRS innovation is their new office in Second Life. (It would truly be a great innovation if the Danish IRS is able to get everyone in SL to pay our modest Danish taxes.)

So INNOVATION takes place at all levels. The problem seems to be managerial – how is the innovative process supported, encouraged, filtered, sustained etc.? .

The good thing about this is that soon the new look will be finished and it is going to look sweet.

Visiting the FLOW Market at Danish Design Center in Copenhagen yesterday I read the heartbreaking and foundation shocking piece of statistics-spam on one of the counters:

1 billion people live on less than 1 US$ a day. Each cow in the European Union receives a total of 2 US$ a day in subsidies

Make me think:

1) What? Are we insane?

2) Cows are great of course, but do they really need that much subsidizing?

3) Lately I have noticed in newspaper that the standard on poverty has been upgraded living on less than 2US$ a day. That’s not because we are getting richer on the global level but because the dollar is becoming cheaper and cheaper for some reason...

The Flow Market is a deeply provocative installation commenting on the entirety of our current society: how we overwork, get stressed, lose meaning of life, are stuck in uncreative patterns

See the ‘Did you know…’ section for more interesting spamtistics.

This post is first going to be about the Well and then about all the very interesting things that Sterling’s address got around to.

The point of the call and website is to bring these people together and by that bring the field of collective intelligence –within academia, organizational practice and social/political change – to form and become an actual filed with collaboration and cross pollination.

Today the field seems to be wide-spread and awakening to an awareness of itself and its many facets. I was fascinated by the number of people that are participating, and each person’s very strong commitment to making a better world.

I hope this evolves fruitfully and with strength, and I hope to be able to write more about this on this blog as well as other places, which I will link to.

Here is the cover.

First of all the field I am part of is changing and recasting. This is the field of collective intelligence which for now, for me has its proxy in the Moving the Edge hosting team.

Then I am two weeks from handing in my dissertation on ‘Designing Social Space, Co-located Social Computing in Physical Context’. More of this work will become available online to a broader public as soon as it has been preliminary accepted for defence for the PhD degree.