About

Not because hiding is always bad. Most useful systems hide something. They compress complexity, remove choices, smooth over edge cases, and make the world easier to move through. The interesting question is what happens next: where the complexity goes, who carries the ambiguity, what becomes automatic, and what kind of agency remains once the interface starts to feel simple.

Most of my writing begins there, in the gap between how systems are described and how they actually behave. It is a surprisingly busy gap. Many organisations have furnished it quite extensively.

What I write about

The essays here circle around a small set of recurring ideas.

Complexity does not disappear; it moves. Clarity does not remove ambiguity; it decides who has to carry it. Some friction protects the moment where judgement enters the system. Agency survives where a system leaves room to see, judge, and refuse. Habit is what happens when design becomes behaviour. Curation begins where production stops being scarce. Convergence shows how different systems start to resemble one another when they adapt to the same pressures.

These are not abstract interests. They show up in roadmaps, meetings, interfaces, defaults, metrics, governance, AI tools, search results, design systems, procurement processes, and the slow institutional drift from intention to habit.

I am interested in the places where responsibility becomes hard to see.

The problem I keep circling

I have spent my career working inside systems that do not fit neatly into product decks.

Large organisations. Legacy platforms. Global teams. Ambiguous ownership. Public-facing services. Procurement systems. Design systems. AI-enabled knowledge tools. Interfaces expected to simplify work they did not create. Strategies that have to survive contact with budgets, governance, operations, and people, which is where many strategies first discover they were mostly decorative.

That work has made me suspicious of clean stories.

Products are rarely just products. They are arrangements of responsibility. An interface decides what a person can see. A workflow decides what counts as normal. A platform decides which forms of reuse are easy and which become political. A design system promises consistency, but also reveals where an organisation was never aligned in the first place.

This site is where I try to name those patterns before they harden into common sense.

Where the view comes from

My writing comes from practice, but it is not only for practitioners.

I have worked across digital transformation, product management, UX, platform strategy, innovation, systems architecture, and organisational change for more than 25 years. I am based in Copenhagen and currently work at UNOPS, where my work has involved digital products, platforms, design systems, AI-enabled knowledge tools, enterprise search, multilingual information access, and delivery across complex international contexts.

That is the CV version.

The more useful version is that I have spent a long time watching the same problem appear in different costumes: a technical constraint that is really an ownership problem; a design problem that is really a governance problem; a strategy problem that is really a language problem; a simplicity problem that is really complexity moved out of sight.

Once you have seen this happen often enough, it becomes difficult to look at a clean interface without wondering who is underneath it with a broom.

Making things by hand

Away from screens, I like practical work: wood carving, cooking, and recently, experimenting with modular synths.

They are different activities, but they keep teaching me the same lesson. Materials have opinions. A piece of wood does not care about the plan in your head. A dish changes as heat, timing, and sequence interact. A modular patch can begin as an elegant idea and become, within minutes, a small diplomatic incident between voltage and optimism.

This is useful.

Practical work reminds me that systems are not understood by description alone. You understand them by handling them, changing them, and seeing what pushes back. The grain splits. The sauce catches. The signal becomes noise. The interface says one thing and the organisation does another.

Judgement is often embodied before it is abstract. You learn by noticing resistance.

That has shaped how I think about digital work more than I expected. The best systems are not just conceived. They are worked with. They have grain, heat, timing, feedback, and limits. Ignore those things and the system will usually find a way to explain them to you later, less politely.

Why this site exists

This site is a place to develop a vocabulary for the work that usually remains implicit.

I am not anti-technology, anti-design, or anti-automation. I have spent too long building these things to pretend the work is optional. But I am sceptical of systems that make their trade-offs disappear.

A smooth interface can reduce effort, but it can also remove the pause where judgement used to happen. A personalised experience can feel generous, but it can narrow the field before the user has a chance to look around. A summary can create clarity, but it can also hide the uncertainty that made the question difficult in the first place. AI can produce more, faster, but that only makes curation, taste, and responsibility more important.

The question is not whether systems should be simpler, faster, or more intelligent. The question is what kind of human capacity remains around them.

The goal is not to make digital systems sound more complicated. It is to be more honest about where the complication already lives. Without that honesty, simplicity becomes theatre. Clarity becomes compression. Automation becomes quiet control. Progress becomes the act of moving the hard part somewhere else and calling it solved.

The work starts by noticing where it went.