Hi my name is Ulrik Hogrebe. This blog contains my CV plus a couple of presentations of projects that I´ve worked on. Feel free to check them out and get in contact if you like what you see. Please distribute, copy, steal, reproduce or pass on anything on this site - just give credit where credit is due. C.V here and informal rants and raves blog here.

I was invited to do a 45 minute talk titled “Beyond Broadcast – New Challenges in a Shifting Multimedia Landscape” for the London division of the University of Copenhagen Alumni Association (I studied Visual Culture at their hallowed halls back in the day). The talk centered around the shift from the broadcast “one-to-many, one size fits all” model to the deeply personalised model that is looming on the horizon. With the web and it’s host of connected devices offering tons of user data, charting everything from a user’s taste, location, history and context of use, the opportunity to make informed decisions as to the type of content one delivers (and even creates) is immense. I argue that this form of personalisation, harnessed correctly, can have an enormous and beneficial impact on the way we consume and engage with content on the web, with ramifications that extend in to learning, entertainment and information seeking in general – and indeed that the cure for “sameness”, paradoxically lies in knowing what people know and what they want – and hence where you might augment, differentiate and ultimately delight.

I am helping put together the Connected Studio event for the BBC’s User Experience and Design department. You can read about the whole thing in detail via the homepage here, but in short; the Connected Studio is a open innovation event, where internals and externals pitch ideas for features and experiences for the BBC’s online portfolio. I wrote a blog post that goes in to some of the detail of the event itself – you can find the original post here – or read it here after the jump.

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A while back, I was charged with looking at Brand Engagement from a BBC Online perspective – looking at how the BBC wants to engage with our audiences online. After a period of research involving users and internal stakeholders, we settled upon a number of principles which we compounded into a manifesto of sorts. A manifesto which we then turned into a script for a little stop motion video that has since been presented internally as well as at a number of key industry events. The film was conceived as a sort of cultural artefact meant to set direction in a more efficient manner than the ol’ powerpoint which we all know and love – but sadly also often gets forgotten, doomed to live out their lives on some remote corner of peoples hard disks.

The whole thing was conceived and executed by my very talented colleagues Karolina Kret and Jacek Barcikowski (and myself of course), with much glueing, cutting, painting, fretting and fidgeting over three weeks, with the very cool guys at Clapham Road Studios and animator extraordinaire Mole Hill to help us get it all in the box (*snigger*) on the final week.

You can see the BBC’s Ralph Rivera (Director of Future Media) present the film at the BBC Industry Briefing at BAFTA in London here from roughly 00.25 to 2.05.

ASHA created by Anders Højmose, Martina Pagura and my self is up for an INDEX. Long way to go yet, but you can give it a “like” and nudge over at INDEX´page. Amazing!

ASHA is – in short – an experimental application for the iPhone, that uses simple bluetooth technology and human relay-based interaction to gather information about survivors in a disaster situation. There is a longer description and a concept description of what it does on on the INDEX link above + one here if they eventually pull down the link.

Changing perceptions, starting conversations, hood after hood

Hoodr is a hyper-local community platform developed specifically to strengthen the social fabric of low-income immigrant neighbourhoods, providing its denizens a means to debate and express local events and opinions while combating the often one-sided picture portrayed by the media. Users snap pictures, upload stories and geo-tag events in their neighbourhoods, uploading them to a common site accessible by locals, outsiders, media, municipality and other stakeholders.

Neighbourhoods with a high percentage of immigrants in Denmark are often stigmatised in the media and by society – portrayed as violent slums and examples of integration policies gone wrong, with it’s citizens often bearing the brunt of a political debate that has become increasingly xenophobic. A stigma that often results in a number of negative results: from poor self-perception amongst it’s citizens, to low property values and other factors that often serve to sustain social ills and prevent positive growth.

However, in truth these areas often sustain complex and thriving local communities and street life, far from the bleak portrayal one sees in the news and the papers. Hoodr posits, that bringing these communities to the surface, we can combat negative perceptions both internally and externally and ultimately empower and de-stigmatise these neighbourhoods and their citizens.

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The Walkshop is done. We spent an amazing evening wandering the streets of Copenhagen, looking for signs of the networked digital in the physical and continuing the conversation over beer and laughs well in to the night. Thanks to everyone who showed up + my two wonderful and very knowledgeable co-hosts Mayo Nissen and Jesper Svenning. Plus a big Thank You to Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim of Do Projects for the support and help.

See all the pics after the jump or even better, read Mayo´s well-written and thought through blow-by-blow account here:

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The guys at PSFK interviewed us for their Future of Health Report – a project in association with Unicef – on our ASHA app, health, technology and designing for developing countries. Read the interview over at PSFK or after the jump

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Mayo Nissen, Jesper Svenning and I are running a walkshop exploring networked urbanism, modeled and encouraged by Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim of Do Projects,. More info + registration after the jump

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Just started a blog to document my thesis project at CIID. Hopefully it will be documenting more progress than breakdown!

Follow along here; ulrikhogrebe.com/thesis

(Because of the sensitive nature of the interviews I conducted during the course of my thesis project, I have password protected this site. I can however unlock parts of it as relevant – contact me if you are interested here)

RHFID Speakers – “This is a Journey into Sound” from Ulrik Andersen Hogrebe on Vimeo.

Using a combination of RFID technology, Processing and Arduino, the RHIFID speakers work as location aware controllers, allowing the user to interact with music and the environment by moving the speakers around.

The RHIFID speakers were used for the project “This is a Journey into Sound” – an educational trip into the history of electronica, rock and hip hop from the past 50 years. A grid is mapped out using RFID tags (the red things on the floor), allowing each user of the two speakers to listen to a song individually, within a specific genre and decade by placing it on the RFID tag. Each RFID is mapped to a song iconic of that decade in the appropriate genre.
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