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.

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.

Playtype is an online type foundry and concept store launched 1st of December 2010, Værnedamsvej 6, Copenhagen, Denmark. As a collaboration between everyone in the e-Types team, we did everything from marketing & PR, to designing products to sanding down the walls. Concept spiel below.

In connection with the revamp and launch of our online type foundry “playtype.com” e-Types decided to open a typographic concept store – Playtype proper or simply “Playtype” – located in the heart of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Basically we love typography – It’s what founded our company. It’s what we work with day in, day out and it’s what continues to make us geek out long into the night. We wanted to create a space where we could share that passion for ligatures and baselines, tracking, kerning and all the other (admittedly slightly nerdy) joys of type.

We´ll be releasing over 100 new fonts by e-Types as well as longtime friends and partners – the prolific London-based typographers A2/SW/HK run by Scott Williams and Henrik Kubel. Also we´ll feature a number of products and editions – some by our own hand, some with a little help from our friends in the design and art world. So if you stop by Copenhagen, do come by for a chat at what we are proudly calling the worlds first brick and mortar type shop. And if your not, go have a gander at the fonts over at playtype.com.

Check out the little “viral” promo we did for the shop here

Playtype (the store) has been featured far and wide – notable mentions are Monocle, Dezeen and PSFK

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Asha is an enquiry into the possibility of using mobile phones and Bluetooth to create improvised communication networks in situations where phone and internet fail. Designed as an iPhone application, Asha helps reunite families and loved ones torn apart by disasters and conflict, through simple relay-based networks using humans and cell phones to carry tiny packages of information – like a name cross-referenced with a location/time stamp.

Using simple Bluetooth technology, Asha allows rescue workers to automatically collect names and locations of people they meet during their normal routines and sync them across platforms. Meeting a person who is missing a loved one, the resulting database can be searched – revealing where and when the loved one was in the vicinity of an Asha equipped phone.

Asha – reuniting refugees across the world from Ulrik Andersen Hogrebe on Vimeo.

Read the rest of this entry »

As part of our skills upgrade at CIID, we explored the potential of Flash as a quick user interface prototyping tool. Asked to design a touch point for the upcoming Copenhagen Bike Share Competition, which aims at refurbishing the iconic copenhagen bike share system, I designed a simple touch screen interface aimed at integration into bus stops and other transport hubs.

The concept opens up questions specifically aimed at the bike share program as a city branding exercise as well as questions of practicality and integration with everyday commuters and the larger public transportation system in general.

Read the rest of this entry »