(some after-thoughts/EULA, this post is mainly Sunday-morning rambling on different thoughts and is, off course, not necessarily a closed and perfect discussion:)

Earlier this week I attended the weekly drawing lecture. The field of art is not my primary field of study, however it is one of my interests. Anyhow, back to the lecture. The course is at a very basic stage and assignment is in the notion of; draw greyscale bars, combining as much material and tools as possible. Off course the motivation behind this is to get used to techniques, tools and materials and the possibilities provided by them. The teacher is almost obsessed in emphasizing this objective for the course. In one rambling on the reason for methodizing the figure/ground notion the teacher explained the reason with the phrase;

“Du må vite hvilke baller du sjonglerer med” (orig)
“You must know which balls you are juggling with” (translated)

I became struck by this metaphor and the thought of fields where this applies became a thought hanging with me for the rest of the week. I found the metaphor to be almost valid for any fields in off course varying degree. The main reason that started the thinking process around this is probably that I’m currently is beginning my master thesis where I write on the understanding of quality in maps, conceptual modeling and the combination of this. This quickly becomes a form of philosophical task where a categorization of quality is needed and thus a segmentation of the understanding of the real world is needed. So, after a day or two thinking on this and the metaphor from the drawing teacher I became to realize that the metaphor fits, like a glow, to the understanding of quality and the formalization of this.

To conclude, after several days of thinking and one blog post I have concluded that the objective for my work with the master thesis is to provide some guide into knowing which balls you have and how to juggle them.

Okey, so for the ones that thought this post was of sexual character, I’m sorry that I’m not able to fulfill your expectations:)

Yesterday me and my girlfriend paid IKEA the first trip this semester. Impressed by how IKEA is able to turn almost any size room into a decent living area I tend to think about the how this knowledge could be applied. IKEA’s show rooms are about 30-45 square meters in which they in some cases fit a bathroom, bedroom, living room, kitchen and even a little storage room. It immediately made me draw parallels to how student accommodation is furnished. Here in Trondheim there is an organization (SIT) which provides cheap, small student rooms – and they maintaing about 3000 rooms. There are 4-5 rooms pr. appartment, each about 10 square meters and designed only for work area and bedroom – the rest they share.

What surprises me here is that IKEA is experts (almost god-like:) in furnishing small rooms – SIT has alot of small rooms, which, unsurprisingly, is desperate for some good design. Wouldn’t this be a perfect oppurtunity for some collaboration? I’m no expert in marketing or business – but I would believe having, say, a high-rise appartment building as a show room – situated, and used by, the primary target group would be good marketing business for IKEA. Offcourse there is a tremendous cost involved – but IKEA has some money and knowledge, and I believe SIT has to. IKEA’s marketing budget can’t be to slim – at least not in Kobe (jp) where they did a similar marketing approach for metros.

Is this a good idea? Is it feasible – both economically and socially?