MD: What was your last LEGO project?
My final set was The Friendship House. My childhood dreams inspired it. It’s an old firehouse turned into a secret children’s hiding place. When I was a child, I dreamt about Villa Villekulla, the one Pippi Longstocking had. A place where no rules apply, where children feel free.
Two years before that, I designed a promotional set attached to a kids magazine. It included a cage with a hamster wheel. I felt like using it somewhere again. In this set there are also lots of different workshop tools, and there is a drop of water under the sink, suggesting a plumbing problem. You really can’t ever get bored with all the LEGO details. Ever since I made the Hot Dog Van, I always try to include a hot dog in my sets.
MD: How did your approach to product design change over those three years at LEGO?
OM: LEGO allowed me to translate having fun designing into making toys. I had a lot of freedom. After work, I could focus on my own projects. Then I decided that I wanted to direct all of my attention on them.
What I care about now is how some innovation becomes the result of play and how objects can develop personalities. I no longer look at objects from a functional point of view, I'd rather focus on the interaction with them, and the emotional aspect stemming from that. If an object has a function and performs it, it can also have an emotional aspect to it. Important objects are linked to memories.
MD: Is this is how Sensitive Dog was born? A robo-dog, that's supposed to remind us about sympathy.
OM: It was born during a six-month course called Fab Academy which I took last year at Fab Lab Spinderihallerne in Denmark. It brings together students from all over the globe, from Australia, Peru, etc. who study at local Fab Labs and attend joint videoconferences. The course program is very hands-on and combines digital fabrication, electronics design and coding. Weekly lectures are conducted live by Prof. Neil Gershenfeld from MIT.
My final project was a dog sculpture that reacts to human touch. An approaching hand is a source of information. It was an attempt of transferring natural behavior onto an object. I wondered what kind of feelings it might awaken in us. Will we treat it like a normal dog if it wags its tail? Perhaps this reaction, so embedded in nature, will make it seem more familiar to us, perhaps we’ll even end up befriending it. We live in an era of moving pictures. It’s only a matter of time before these pictures gain new dimensions. A brand new exciting, magical branch of design is being born – the design of smart objects.