Progress Depends on Unreasonable People Making the World Fit Us
When I was growing up, anything unfamiliar was most likely too difficult or not worth pursuing. A grade school teacher routinely praising a drawing is after all more manageable than telling a kid to follow his dreams. Encouraged not to, I continued drawing and airbrushing sci-fi sunsets in my parents’ basement and spending my youth in my underpants hunched over my beloved Amiga 500. At a time when a computer was a calculator to most, we teamed up: designers, coders and musicians to compete in a computer art subculture we called the demo-scene. We twisted and turned every last pixel to create digital things never seen before. This is where I learned that anything is possible when you team up with the right people.
Later I enrolled in Design School Kolding, which was like a magnetic field to me. It created order out of chaos, pulling in talents from all over. Everyone was set on a journey to put egos and past endeavours behind us, to discover something new and personal instead – growing up as designers, I guess.
And while we’re guessing, my guess as to why I’m in this book, is most likely because I was a part of the early team that brought the Unity game engine to life. It turned out to be a big deal. I later moved on to create Issuu, which is now the biggest publishing platform in the world. I seem to have a knack for using a design-centric approach to create digital things that grow into something a lot of people love – or at least use.
Companies and products tend to get lost in business. Triangular models of success, burn-rates, funnel-sub-optimisation, Gantt charts and other sexy abbreviations. It’s all too easy to forget that it’s worth nothing if the product doesn’t deliver. In our networked, post-industrial era, a great product experience is the supreme ruler of everything we do.
So I’ve ended up as someone who creates products, experiences and companies – although it’s really one and the same when it works, a kind of aesthetic creator that wants to do things my way – combined with a strong sense of empathy towards the people using it. I try not to get used to “the way things are,” and I complain enough to make sure that the status quo never forms the basis for looking ahead. I love design, but I’ve learned not to mix up what looks good with what works. Design is one of the strongest things I know, and how I see the world – although relatively few people share this vision, and they’re usually our customers.
The best part is that I get to build things with some of the weirdest, annoying and incredible people you can imagine. Here’s to being unreasonable.
