Interviews: Inside a Maker’s Thinking
Rather than publishing press releases for new product launches, we record long-form conversations with practitioners who maintain, repair, and plan the physical environment across the region.
Designing for the Twentieth Sanding
Recorded in a shared woodworking shop in Malmö with spatial planner Linnea Holm (Malmö) and cabinetmaker Mikkel Lindqvist (Aarhus), discussing why municipal school and courtyard furniture fails when designers hide mechanical joints.
When both of you inspect a newly built housing cooperative in Sweden or Denmark, what is the first detail you check in the shared rooms?
Linnea Holm
I look at the underside of the tables in the courtyard house and the acoustic panels in the stairwell. If the table surface is a 0.6-millimeter oak veneer glued over particleboard, everyone becomes anxious the first time a child drops a metal thermos or spills beet juice. A communal room only works when materials forgive heavy use. Solid 32-millimeter local pine or ash can be planed or sanded twenty times over a century.
Mikkel Lindqvist
And I check how the legs attach to the apron. In the 1950s, Børge Mogensen and FDB Møbler made sure a local carpenter could knock a loose wedge back into place with hide glue and a wooden mallet. Today, too many manufacturers use proprietary cast-aluminum brackets that go out of production after four years. Honest joinery means visible wedges, standard metric bolts, or knock-down mortise joints that any resident can tighten during a spring workday.
Is there a difference in how Danish and Swedish clients react to knots and color variations in timber?
For decades, export catalogs demanded clear, knot-free heartwood, which meant discarding up to sixty percent of a felled tree. Now, municipal procurement officers in both countries are rewriting tenders to specify "character-grade" beech and pine. A tight sound knot is structurally strong and tells you how the tree grew in the wind.
Acoustics, Wool, and the Quiet Room
Recorded over an audio link between textile engineer Aino Korhonen in Tampere and acoustic consultant Sigríður Jónsdóttir in Reykjavík, exploring why triple-glazed buildings need soft fibers.
Energy codes across Finland and Iceland require airtight envelopes and triple-pane glass. How has that affected the way rooms sound inside?
Sigríður Jónsdóttir
When you seal out street noise and wind—which is essential in Reykjavík—the ambient noise floor inside an apartment drops dramatically. Suddenly, if your walls are poured concrete and your floor is hard stone, every clink of a coffee spoon echoes for two seconds. People think a room feels cold visually when, in fact, it feels fatiguing acoustically.
Aino Korhonen
That is exactly why traditional Finnish ryijy (knotted pile wall rugs) and Icelandic lopi wool panels are returning to schools and apartments. Originally, a ryijy kept sleigh passengers warm and blocked drafts on log walls. In a modern concrete building, its varying pile heights absorb mid- and high-frequency human speech, turning a reverberant box into an intimate conversation space without synthetic foam.