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.

Following my final exam at CIID, I was asked by Mike Albers, Head of Service Design & Delivery at BBC if I could be interested in joining the Beebs. Long story short, I accepted (obviously!) and can now call myself Senior Service Designer at Future Media & Technology, BBC. Exciting times ahead!

Sadly this also marks the end of roughly 5 years of employment at e-Types. There is no doubt in my mind, that I owe an enormous amount of my skill-set and outlook to my extremely smart and able colleagues at e-Types. Colleagues who over the years became friends and something very akin to family. So a heartfelt and slightly soppy and bleary-eyed thanks from me, even as I struggle with the move to London, figuring out how to cope with a gi-normous and utterly amazing new organizations, new colleagues and general dazed-and-confusedness:)

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

I was nominated as one of 38 bourgeoning new media up-and-comings by New Media Days, one of the largest New Media conferences in the north. Quite an honor! Thanks go out to the jury who nominated me – you can check out the rest of the nominees here, including Anders Højmose and Sebastian Rønde Thielke, who I studied with at CIID.

There’s an interview up with our Art Curator on the e-Types website, that explains the motivations behind our art habit here. More pics after the jump:

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.

Hoodr was born from the hypothesis, that there is true strength to be found in the local – and that local integration and empowerment are far stronger tools for creating positive and reciprocal integration than attempting to force people into contrived notions of “Danishness” – a concept that even Danes have difficulty agreeing upon.

Through interviews and co-creation sessions, the concept has gone though a number of different iterations – from personal stories dealing with softer issues, to classic citizen journalism to the current community platform that enables the low-level chatter that makes communities vibrant and vital – offline and online.

Process – creating a design framework

Hoodr is an open platform capable of sustaining any number and type of users, but is developed specifically to involve local youth from immigrant backgrounds, since they often are the most stigmatised while also being potentially one of the strongest and most vocal resources.

The backbone of Hoodr is a design framework consisting of 5 principles gleaned through interviews, co-creation sessions and prototyping with 3 sets of users: extreme, expert and core. The framework is an engine; a system and a set of guidelines for setting up projects that deal with youth from immigrant or refugee backgrounds that is free of political agendas and inadvertent discrimination, while sidestepping some of the inherent flaws that the political and municipal system bears now.

There is a prototype available at www.ulrikhogrebe.com/proto. Please contact me for further details and access (the prototype has restricted access in order to respect some of my users request for privacy and anonymity.)

Hoodr and especially the analysis and process work behind it was very well received by examinators Mike Albers, Golan Levin and Matt Cottam at my final exams at CIID.

I responded with a comment on PSFK to a post on PSFK about a new service “Stumblesafely” that basically maps out crime areas in Washington, with the purpose of making it safer for people to get home at night. Although I have no intention or wish to bash the project, which I see as serving a noble cause – I did wonder about some of the consequences of this kind of info-mapping. Since I was dealing with a related issue during my own final project at CIID, I wanted to start a conversation about some of the unintended consequences of free information;

From the post: “I think there is a problem with this kind of mapping – mainly that you risk stigmatizing certain neighborhoods and areas, driving down property values, increasing fear levels, spurring people with resources to move out of the area and generally, you risk compounding the problem rather than solving it. While information should certainly be free, we – as creators of that information – also need to be aware that releasing any kind of information into the world can have unintended consequences and work at coming up with solutions to counter them. Sometimes I feel it is too easy to just throw stuff out there under the “information should be free, let somebody else sort it out” banner.”

PSFK decided that my thoughts were relevant enough to include as a post. My own final project deals exactly with the reverse – trying to de-stigmatize low-income areas and areas with high quotas of immigrant populations, especially in a time where the debate on immigrants has reached alarming levels of radicalization. I will write a full post on my finals in the near future. Thanks to PSFK for listening to my ramblings.

Image above: Chaz of Toro Y Moi, courtesy of Johanne Fick.

RHFID Speakers, a different directional sound
Speakers are neutral. They carry the sound from its decoded source to our ears, but they are firm, static and impartial. They can be adjusted to create a better listening experience, or multiplied and singularly managed to enhance it even more, but they are meant to stay where you placed them the first time they were used. RHFID Speakers by Ulrik Andersen Hogrebe, Filippo Cuttica and Jacek Barcikowski are basically questioning this neutrality. Equipped with RFID tags their classic hi-fi speakers are sensitive to their positions, changing the sound they are playing accordingly. Instinctively they remind of old FM radios that would change their output because of their new reception/location, and “R” stands for “Radio” in RFID… When placed close to each other they play the same song, this time in stereo. But their relationship between sound and position opens different possibilities and generally speaking is significant of how radio waves can carry sound, data and data influencing sound. That old FM radio, if properly modified, would now play a different song, depending on its neighborhood.