Great Blog

Paulo Coelho was dressed in all black, the bookstore was dressed in all black, the 400-person line extending way out of the store was all dressed in black – and it was raining outside. Yet it was a moment of light and hope last Thursday in Stockholm’s Söder district in the new Skrapan mall when the mega popular writer was signing his new book The Witch of Portobello at the new concept store of Akademiebokhandeln. At his stage of popularity Coelho can pick where he goes and he decided to go to Stockholm because he felt it was hugely important that someone was opening a new bookstore at a time when everybody is closing them.

Black is the color of dress for those who know in Stockholm this fall and it is also the color of the new store (could it be that the choice of the iconic color of Monocle magazine has something to do with this?). All shelves, counters, screens, even the staff were matt black. But it was actually a nice backdrop to the tastefully made selection of books, magazines, audio books and films glowing in halogen light. The store made you want to browse and made you find gorgeous things.

Coelho sat behind the desk for the first hour, looking his fans in the eyes, thanking everyone for coming and for reading his books. Everybody had a story to tell and the goateed Brazilian with burning eyes listened as long as it took him to sign the book. And then to the next book and next story. After a short break, for the next hour, he worked the line on foot, reaching the last in the line by the entrance just before it was time to close the store. “You learn these tricks, you know”, he explained. “You can do this faster by standing up, and people like it when you go to them.”

Coelho is about stories, quotes and wisdom. During the dinner afterwards he said that one of his own favorite quotes is by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier: “Men only learned to fly when they stopped replicating the birds.”

Don’t copy, do your own thing. Even if you are dressed like everyone else.

“The most important thing is the wording of what we do, the creation of vocabulary”, described Kjetil Thorsen, one of the founders of the Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta their way of working to me when I interviewed him. The whole interview can be found in Helsinki Design Week Magazine that is just out. What stuck with me from the interview was the role of a common vocabulary in the work of these architects. They are best known for the library in Alexandria, Egypt and for winning the commission to design a museum at the WTC site in New York – and for working collaboratively. Their way of making collaborative designs is to start by talking until they share a vocabulary, and first after that start drawing. If the process is done right, what they come up with belongs to all of them and no one at the same time. Common words lead to common deeds.

There is an important lesson here, not only to designers but everyone involved with projects. So many go wrong because those involved don’t spend enough time developing a common language. People think they do but find out too late they did not.

Norwegians seem to be a nation of great communicators. Today I had the honor of interviewing Princes Märtha Louise of Norway at the shopping mall Sello in Leppävaara. She was absolutely wonderful and engaging before and audience of a few hundred children, adults and elderly that had gathered to see her. It is interesting that as good as she is, she seems to have great trouble explaining to the Norwegians what she actually does at her school. In Finland she could have told the crowd anything and they would have loved her.