There is a chair I think about often. Beautifully made, inviting. The moment you see it, you want to sit. No instruction required. 

A PDF from Rainforest Foundation Norway. Rigorous, well researched, and important. The kind of document that gets cited in policy rooms by people who already know what the numbers mean.

Leonard Koren's Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers has lived on my bedside table for years. I read it when something feels off. When I have been thinking in English and Norwegian too long.

My Apple laptop sits beside me, perfectly capable hardware, abandoned by its operating system. It didn't break.

Last week, while vibe coding, creating real time interactions between gesture and sound through code.

A bag of potato chips is telling us something.

I was invited to host a dinner in a space designed by Sverre Fehn here in Norway. 

I've been looking at the many editions of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood in Japanese, American, European, the same novel, reimagined dozens of times.

Is Taste the core skill now?
AI is getting very good at producing what already looks right. That's exactly why judgment matters more.

Growing up in Japan, my family banked with Tokyo Mitsubishi. When the time came, so did I.

Nearly two decades ago, I saw this packaging in a Nordic supermarket. I was a Japanese designer living in Oslo, temporary relocated from NYC

AI is artificial flavoring. Design is craft food.
Artificial flavor is engineered to satisfy. Consistent, scalable, immediately recognizable.

I knew it wasn't my door.
I was a teenager. Coming home late. Dark street, darker hallway. Pure autopilot.

My relationship with music started as a hunt. You'd discover an artist through a magazine, a friend's tip, or a concert and then commit by buying the album

When two multidisciplinary designers set out to collaborate, we expected great design. What emerged was something neither of us anticipated.

We often think design should instruct, but I've found the most profound designs don't shout—they invite.

Design is both verb and noun. Like furoshiki, it's not just the finished package, but the ongoing act of wrapping itself.

A photograph is a framed container of reality.
It asks us to pause, look closer, and find meaning in what actually unfolded in front of a lens.

The Greenland flag worked silently for 40 years. Designed in 1985 by Thue Christiansen, a simple disk offset on a bicolor field representing sun rising over ice, it did its job without fanfare.

From Hieroglyphs to Emojis: We've Come Full Circle
Ancient Egyptians used 𓂀 for life, 𓊽 for power, 𓆓 for transformation. Today we use 💚 for life, 💪 for power, 🦋 for transformation.