When Design Becomes an Addiction

Design was part of me long before I had words for it. I was always drawn to things that felt considered, intentional, beautiful. But what I felt was scattered – no structure, no language, no frame of reference.

Stockholm gave me that.

I remember my first flight there. Landing at Skavsta – a small airport an hour from the city centre. And the first thing that stopped me when I walked out wasn't the architecture, wasn't the landscape.

It was a Flygbussarna ad.

A poster on the terminal wall. Clean, simple, stripped of everything unnecessary. Next to it, leaflets folded with a precision that felt deliberate. Information signs designed as if someone had genuinely thought them through. Even the bin – the kind that in most places would be a metal bucket – was designed. Part of the space. Part of the whole.

That was the moment I understood what design actually is. Not as a discipline. As a way of thinking.

In Scandinavia, design isn't decoration. It's a starting point. Not something added at the end – a condition set at the beginning.

And you see it everywhere. In public spaces, in architecture, in the way people dress. But most clearly – in the brands that come from there.

ARKET and COS – minimalism taken to its logical conclusion, where every collection feels like a considered whole, not a pile of clothes. Stora Bageriet – a Stockholm café whose branding is so good it started selling its own merch. Because it could. Because people want to wear the logo. Stora Skuggan – perfumes in packaging that belongs in a gallery. Aarke – a brand that took a water filter carafe and turned it into something you want to put on your counter and show off. Steamery, where even laundry detergent is designed as if it were a product launch at a design fair.

This isn't coincidence. It's culture.

The love of design in Sweden isn't learned – it's inherited. Passed down through generations, built into the way people see the world. Nobody there asks "is this really necessary" about a well-designed object. You won't find many executives in ill-fitting suits laughing at "all this design stuff." Aesthetics are understood – not as indulgence, but as value.

I came back from that trip a different person. Not dramatically – quietly. But my eye started seeing more. And it couldn't stop.

It's the kind of addiction you can't undo. You can't unlearn how to see. You can't stop noticing bad typography on a poster, an inconsistent visual identity in a café, a logo that says nothing – or says the wrong thing. The brain processes it automatically. All the time. Everywhere.

Design is now present in every aspect of my life. In what I buy. In how I organise the space around me. In what I don't buy – because it's poorly designed, even if it works. In which places I avoid. In which aesthetics I refuse to let into my surroundings.

Does that sound like an obsession? Maybe. But it's also a filter.

And that filter applies to work too.

With every new project, I check one thing: whether the client understands that good design matters. Not decoratively – strategically.

If they're indifferent to it, treat design as "something to figure out at the end," ask why "all this design stuff" has to cost what it costs – I know one thing: we won't work well together.

I say this directly. It's not arrogance. It's saving time – theirs and mine. A collaboration where one side doesn't understand the value of what the other does doesn't end well for anyone.

Design changed how I see the world. Stockholm showed me that the world can look different – that aesthetics aren't a luxury for the select few, but a decision that can be made anywhere. In every object, every space, every detail.

And since that moment, I haven't been able to see it any other way.