5 Minutes with… Jussi Edlund

Jussi> I never saw myself as a creative kid - and I don’t really see myself as a creative person now. I’m a craftsperson. 

Maybe you could put me somewhere on a creative spectrum, but I’m more obsessed with the details - with the thing that you can hold in your hand, as opposed to the idea alone.

Jussi> I wish I were an artist! But no, I am not. I’m too pragmatic. The people who I would describe as artists tend to have a compulsion for expression - they create in their spare time, be it drawing or writing or whatever form it may take. 

In my spare time, I tinker. I spent a lot of time in China, where I learned about electronics and got really fascinated by manufacturing. I like to take things which have one function and try to rebuild them with that function put to a slightly different use. Perhaps that’s my own kind of self-expression - but it’s expressing functionality and pragmatism, not what I’d describe as ‘art’. 

Jussi> I’m an outsider. I’ve been in Asia for a while now having arrived in 2007, but I’ve been an outsider this whole time. I’m Swedish by birth, and that’s where I lived for my whole life until I one day decided to move to Singapore. 

I’m lucky to be from Scandinavia in a sense, insofar as that’s a slight overlap with the Japanese psyche of how you solve problems and deal with both customers and staff in a very humble way. Over the course of my time in Asia, I’ve gotten more use out of my listening skills than talking. 

Added to that, being an outsider is good because it means you’re very often seeing things for the first time. I’ve always been quite curious. I ask why things are the way they are. So the constant exposure to the different and the new is stimulating for me. And that outsider-driven curiosity does lend itself well to design. 

Jussi> I’ve no doubt that I’m tremendously coloured by my upbringing in ways that I don’t even realise! 

Painting with an extremely broad brush, there is definitely a pragmatism to Swedish design aesthetics. Beauty is equally as important as function. That’s something that I certainly carry with me - an idea is only good if it works. If you look at the really big Swedish brands like IKEA or Volvo, they carry that pragmatism and sense of function which is deeply ingrained somewhere in my brain, too. 

Jussi> Well, we’ve recently published the Accenture Life Trends for 2025. These of course are global, but one which particularly resonates here in APAC is the sense of a revolution in working culture, where people value work/life balance above all else. 

In Japan for instance, the working culture has gone through a massive shift in the past few years. In the past people would adhere to corporate structure without question. But now, you might interview candidates and they’ll ask directly about topics such as working hours and remote working. That just would not have happened five years ago. 

In terms of design, I’ve recently been working with my colleague Olof Schybergson on a point of view that we call ‘fluid experiences’. That’s really about asking what is going to happen to experiences following the advent of generative AI. Our view - and this is strongly influenced by trends I’m seeing on the ground here in Asia - the ability to do everything in one place with the help of an AI assistant. Building on what’s happened in social commerce (another trend which started life in Asia), where customers are now used to shopping via Instagram or TikTok, why wouldn’t they be ready to do literally everything in one place with the help of AI? It’s something which could bring about the end of separate apps on a device, at least as we currently understand it. 

Something that needs to be accounted for in that discussion is the topic of trust, which was another theme from Accenture’s Life Trends. We’re seeing so many fake product reviews and scams online that there is a serious potential to damage trust in digital marketplaces. We are seeing consumers hesitate when making purchases, questioning “whether they can trust the brand or not”. Brands need to reconsider how to orchestrate ‘trustworthiness’ in an age of generative AI. 

Jussi> That’s the all-important question, and we’re working on the answer. There are many ways to leverage design to orchestrate trust. You can build transparency into design in a way that’s easy for a customer to access and understand. You can instil a sense of trust by elevating the customer experience and polishing the look and feel. This is something we’re working on every day. 

Jussi> I say that because generative AI is going to make it more convenient to access every single function you want from a device in one place. The reason that apps are the defining way of interacting with your device is because they used to be the most convenient way of doing something. The idea that I can send money to you with five taps was, and still is, awesome. 

But we’re now seeing how functions like that are going to be made even more frictionless through the integration of AI. We’re not far away from me simply being able to ask my phone to send you ten dollars and it will happen without any taps at all. 

That’s a huge convenience for the customer, and it also suggests there is about to be a massive shift in the touchpoints we have with brands. If you want to know why so many companies are investing so much money in the development of AI assistants, I’d suggest that’s the reason. They’re probably going to be the sole touchpoint we have with all of our devices. 

Websites removed our need to visit a branch to get things done. Apps made it easier to do the same things on the fly, but what happens after apps? Will my in-phone assistant remove the need to see a UI at all, and save us from even that amount of friction? And at what point do we actually want to put some friction back?

 

This also brings the topic of trust into sharp focus. If you’re going to delegate all of your busywork to an AI, it’s going to need to be one that you trust. Perhaps today it might be hard to imagine trusting an AI to take care of a mortgage application for you… but in the future, it might not seem so strange. 

Jussi> Craft and curiosity are the two things that you need to be passionate about. I think they’re two of the most important aspects in modern design. 

There’s a pendulum that swings between methodology-based design and the soul and heart of design. Ten years ago, the pendulum swung too far towards methodology, I think - the idea that a designer need simply follow a recipe and they would arrive at an ‘optimal’ outcome. When I looked at portfolios from designers of that period, so many of them were identical. 

We’re in a healthier place now in terms of a balance between methodology and imagination. It’s okay to express something of yourself in a design - so long as it doesn’t take over and detract from functionality. We’re searching for designs that feel unique - so long as they still work. 

My distilled advice would simply be to remember that great design has a point of view.  So make sure you have one, too.