Lise Thomsen from the Confederation of Danish Industry told us about how Danish design giant Bang & Olufsen uses co-creation in their design process. 

Lise: I actually made an interview with a designer from Bang & Olufsen. First he says that Bang & Olufsen is the only sound company in Europe that is on its own that still owns themselves.

It's not a part of a huge Japanese concern.

Julie: ...or a huge conglomerate. They stayed independent.

Lise: It's yeah, they are independent and that's because of design and then he described the design process as a process where everybody is part of this process and everybody is asked. So they will contribute within this process, and they contribute to create the best product ever. And they will not stop until everybody feels like they have contributed with the best they can.

Julie: Amazing that Bang & Olufsen sees their design process as a big part of what has helped them remain an independently owned maker of high end quality Danish design sound products. It also results in some very beautiful Danish design.

Photo credit: Bang & Olufsen

Astrid:  You really invite people into a process and make and make them an important part of the initial exhibition that's going to be in the end, but the process is actually the project, right? I mean it's the way we meet each other and explore. Explore…I mean in this case it was our data and how we can combine that and talk about that and learn…learn something about this whole part of our world that data is. But doing so through our craft.

Julie: So somehow making that data tangible.

Astrid:  Making it tangible and also talking about it through a language of craft where we are at least this group of people participating here, they had craft as a safe space and something that is well known to them and also combining it with the data language and both the embroidery and weaving which we used in this project, it has like a binary language. I mean the loom was a computer before there was a loom before there was a computer, I mean.

And so we already know this, this language... 

Julie: Zeros and the ones....

Astrid: …the zeroes and the ones and and we have the right to…to have a voice within this technical world, a lot of people wouldn't normally have looked at this personal data and actually given it like a thought...it's something that you feel repelled from almost.

But here working with it also together in this group, where it was safe to say, “I don't know anything.” But we're exploring it and we're learning it as we go along and also in order to be able to be part of the conversation in general and say, "hey, I have actually talked, I've actually looked into my own data. I have embroidered them, now I understand them like this."

It’s also looking at what was interesting in the data, what actually can I recognise myself from, from these traces that I leave? But I think what was most important was for people to have the experience of, "I have a right to say something about this topic and I have a voice. And I have all these amazing skills within crafts and textiles that is a language to talk about this topic."

So that was what the project was also about. Because co- creating is not about like just having everyone do what they want to do.

Julie: No, you need to have a framework.

Astrid: In order for it to actually also in the end…for this process to become a work of art.

Astrid: When you when you gather things out of a mine, everything is really dirty. There's sort of this rub off of both like the mountain that's been blown to pieces and ground  into almost like flour in order to get this gold out. Everything is so dusty and so dirty, so both like the nature and the people and the tools they sort of rub off on each other. I mean and there's nothing is clean.

There’s like this rub off of materials and there's one story there. But she wanted me to sort of…can you…can you weave this process? Can you weave this mountain? So that we can show it together with all these objects from the mine and then also with Nikolai Appel’s jewelry that is made from Greenland gold. 

But we didn't as much want to talk about that actually - the jewels and the rubies so much as the process in order to get them. 

So then it becomes my job to sort of do that and can you weave the inside of a mine?

And you can weave anything. 

Julie: Wow!

Astrid: You can weave anything. Yes, I feel that's true.

Astrid: And it's quite beautiful. And then also translating that into textiles and then weaving that together, the only thing that actually came from the mine that I wove directly in was this detonator thread.

Julie: OK, is it a kind of wire?

Astrid: It's a kind of wire. They're bright yellow, bright pink - they're plastic, plastic-coated, and they have been used in the blasting, of dynamite in the mountains, you have these plastic wires that sort of get blown up and I wove them directly into the mountain.

Once you're done like it's, it becomes sort of a leftover plastic waste that's sort of lying there between all the rocks.

Julie: And they don't gather it up. 

Astrid: They don't gather it. You don't collect the leftover waste from from a mining project like this because it's too expensive. So they just leave it. So, but then we took some of it and wove it in into these pieces. And so that then becomes the story of this mining, what it means to to gather resources...

Julie:  Embodied in cloth...

Astrid: So it's sort of like a woven mountain and it makes sense when you see it, I feel. But that's also a process you don't know until you do it so.

Julie: That's amazing. It's an amazing co-creative project.