Ongoing

Can anything really be said about the future? Many mean that the prognosticators that organisations rely on today are no more correct than the Roman vestals. I claim that we are heading for a new epoch, one where we have a greater possibility to see the future as it will be, whether we want to or not.

Cesare Borghia, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin are all examples of evil personified. At least if we define evil as individuals, physical or spiritual, who have caused the unhappiness, misery or death of many people. Psychiatrist Carl Jung meant, interpreted freely, that evil comes from our shadow

Swedish values are of course typical Swedish. I have studied values a long time but never compared Swedish and Russian values. Are there similarities? Differences? Geografically we are not that far from each other. But distance is not always crucial. Can we understand each other?

There is war in Ukraine and Putin’s war machine is grinding a country into gravel. Two years of pandemic hardship stays with us and we still have not recovered. Reports scream that the climate is deteriorating more rapidly than scientists have expected. But I am an optimist.

Two hundred years of urban development seemed to be a primal force and natural law as reliable as gravity. What will become of all the notions of the growing city, the physical trade and the offices? How do we create a narrative of a city that can attract new generations?

It is Monday afternoon and you are heading into a mall in a town somewhere in Sweden. You are hunting for a new cable for your computer. You have just passed through the doors and suddenly it happens, you are struck by shopping mall apathy.

Shootings and gangster related deaths are spreading like a pandemic in our at risk areas. Nobody quite knows why, or how we should stop the killing. Poverty and exclusion are presented as possible explanations. What if it is not about social factors but something else...

The lines are snaking longer than ever in front of the luxury stores in recently re-opened cities. Hermès, Prada, Gucci and their likes rise from the ashes and put up better numbers than before the pandemic. Generation Z seems to be becoming the most luxury hungry generation ever.

From a day to another; who would really miss a squashbuckling brand of gambling? Or another brand of creamy youghurt or another brand of the-most-climate-friendly power company? Probably no one at all.

What do you think represents beauty in the future? Gucci’s CD, Alessandro Michele, is providing something new with great value and astonishing reach in terms of originality. Time and again the brand has insightfully captured the societal spirit.

Great shifts and crises create space for change, for new thoughts, ideologies, values and new aesthetics. What was regarded as attractive in design, architecture and fashion a mere decade ago becomes nigh despised in this shift. The change is swift.

200 years of urban development seemed a primal force and natural law as reliable as gravity. There will always come a day when Mega trends weaken and become questioned. It is a quick, surprising development. It has now happened. What will become of the growing city?

Are you creative? Probably not. True creativity is rare, most surveys of creativity show this, but that is not something you need to lament. Yesterday I met one of the people behind Justin Bieber. A cog in the great machinery that makes everything function for a...