Julie: Do you think that being an industrial designer, does that give you something else than if you had been classically trained as a furniture designer from the beginning?

Nikolai: Personally, for me, I think the industrial design approach went or was just a natural stepping stone for me to enter this career because I guess to some extent, I'm logically wired, so that made a lot of sense. And the whole idea of, you know, researching, understanding, looking into a particular problem from sort of a structured approach and crystallising findings, insights, something that would surprise you, that would be a problem to solve, basically.  

I think it's just a really productive and a really good approach to do industrial design. Because at the end of the day, at least, that's what drives me, is to solve something and make either something better or introduce something that, you know, resonates with a problem, and of course the problem can be very wide. A chair.

Julie: And it isn't necessarily a negative problem, the problem can be, “where does one sit?”

Nikolaj: No, no, no. It's just you know exactly like the chair has been there forever, right? And it still has four legs and has a seat and has a back. And there's not to say a problem, but there's still an evolution going on that you need to be mindful of. So maybe the scale or the optics of solving something that is maybe aesthetically more problem-based rather than maybe a classic, real problem-based process where you would might have to solve let's say, for somebody that's disabled, then a chair would be a completely different type of project, right? Because then there would be some really factual concrete issues to solve that would then at least influence the result.

Julie: But, but isn't it also some somehow in Danish design  the problems that the chairs, the classic chairs all solved were also problems of manufacturing? It's like how can we efficiently manufacture this? How can we mass produce it but have it still look beautiful? I mean, it isn't entirely foreign to...

Nikolai: No, no, no, no. I think actually industrial design, you know all as it started then you know. Because but you're right.  It started out of the necessity right post Second World War. So a lot of designers were looking into manufacturing processes. You know that there's a technical development going on which we need to tap into in order to move forward. So that became a lot of the classics that we know today. That's an industrial design approach as well.

Claus:  Yeah, I would say when I chose my kitchen at home, that was the only thing I was 100% sure of - that it had to be a Sociable Kitchen®.

Julie: Right, which is what?

Claus: Which is for me having an island and place the sink on an island. So when I stand by the sink, I face my family. That was it was set in stone. The rest was a little bit fluffy. It came down the road. But having a Sociable Kitchen® was a decision that was made even before we decided to have a new kitchen, I would say. 

And where is it going? At Kvik, we really have a true interest in how people live in their homes and how they work in their kitchen, etc. And so we follow that and monitor it.

Julie: How do you do that?

Claus: You talk to people, that's one way of doing it, but you can also, for example, now we just talked about the smart appliances and the Wi-Fi enabling we could see before Corona, for example, nobody was using that because Siemens and these big players, they can see when you activate your device.  Nobody was really doing it but then during Corona all of a sudden people started to activate their devices.

Julie: Because they were home to play with it?

Claus: And I think the man was in the kitchen too, all of a sudden because then he wanted to play with the controls.

Julie: Okay, right. So he wants to control it from his phone?

Claus: So we get an indication that now it’s more people in there. We also know that people are telling us that now I invite my daughter to bake cookies, et cetera.

So more people are in the kitchen. So I think The Sociable Kitchen® and the fusion of the old fashioned work triangle where you take some logistic principles into consideration when planning the kitchen. That's pretty smart.

Just to give you an example of where what I did with my kitchen, I have the sink in an island so I stand there a lot of the time. Most of the time in the kitchen you stand by the sink. I face my family then. If my son and daughter are in the kitchen, I have a waste bin system that is not under the sink. It's moved away. It's moved to the side so they can open it without interrupting.

Julie: Without interrupting who’s at the sink?

Claus: Exactly. Yeah. So thinking about these things is cool. I cannot imagine not having a Sociable Kitchen® in our house.

Photo credit: Claus Johnsen