Mads got me thinking yesterday, about what all this about Danish Sound Design actually means. And seemingly himself too (see his 2. comment). And while typing this and being about to write a catchy executive summary of our Manifesto for Danish Sound design, a business development promotion from the Danish Foreign Ministry dumps into my mailbox. And it clearly represent the old school ‘we-beat-them-on-technology’ which both Mads and I want to avoid.


Well, one thing’s for sure, it’s not interesting let alone lucrative to compete with the iPod wonder. Only in the sense, that Apple’s success with the iPod is due to an intelligent (and probably quite lucky) multidimensional thinking far superior to a pure hardware driven approach. When I’m thinking Danish Sound Design I think of audio services and design, for which we of course should deploy world leading Danish technology for (from the fields of acoustics, sound production and control). Services that might end up continuing the Danish tradition for clarity, simplicity and quality rather than the extremely lucrative ‘teen-segment-services’. But it is admittedly a new frontier, so we might not yet understand the full implications of all the competencies build up in Denmark and a world wide almost totally neglected field of design. There’s simply too much territory to get a proper sense of direction (that’s when technical ‘inventions’ come in handy, as they naturally point out directions). In early phases of innovation you always tend to extrapolate from a look backwards and sideways (a fallacy my iPod post was very close to commit), but the ambitions of our Danish Design exploration is actually more fundamental and thus also more challenging. It covers political, educational, regional and of course business aspects and already that broad probably block us from fast disruptive innovations. But it might build a more solid fundament for long-term value creation. At least our timing is right as witnessed by the stream of events and publications that have surfaced since we started this December 2004. But please help me with your ideas and opinions on the horizon: how do we build on existing leading qualities in Denmark and still avoid the ‘tech-driven-or-too-nice-and-neat’ approach that we’ve lost ground on lately? I’ll try to keep a mental diary here for what I come up with.

Link: The foreign Ministry promotion