The founder of Teenage Engineering opens up to his creative space

Are these limitations helping you be more creative?

— Exactly. It’s the most critical part. With any kind of creative work you start disabling as much as possible and narrow it down only to the necessary tools you need, and from there start making the work. That’s what I believe makes you super creative.

At Teenage Engineering now we are about 60 and I understand that if you are involved in every little part of the business, it destroys you. So a few years ago I started to rebuild the organisation to essentially shoot me out of daily operations so now I can work on my own projects, and try to stay focused on the things I want to do.

I believe design is just good engineering. That’s why I tell my designers to always think like an engineer. So I set up really strict rules on how they are allowed to work. So for example, we’re only allowed to use six or eight colours in total, same with the typeface, we only write in lowercase with one font in a set of sizes that is in a system c

I really believe in sticking to your gut feeling and don’t try to be anything else if not yourself.

We only want to make great products and when you don’t focus only on making money and have reached a certain level, everything becomes about quality. Right now, there is a certain cultural fascination with fast growth, IPOs and so on, but I want to go slow, really slow and think long-term. It takes time to do good things. You see, this cultural phe

I’ve always questioned why people have hobbies, why can’t life just be one entity, why do you have to separate family from work?

I follow the ebb and flow of my energy

What’s so beautiful about creating products is that saying it in a poetic way, if you have that passion it naturally starts waves and those waves connect people.

Creative work over revenue?

— I always planned to live in a one-room apartment without any money. I don’t want to be connected to any material stuff. I like things because it’s an experience; I can be materialistic in that way, for instance, I can buy an expensive car just to explore how it is to drive it but then for me it’s more the learnin

It’s super interesting for me to see how many successful companies had this kind of setup, where products got created from a place of passion and as soon as they start to speculate on what the market wants in order to make more money, they inevitably start to fail because all you’re looking at is the present situation, not how it’s going to be in t