For this week’s Time Well Spent, the interview series exploring how Bulbul friends, partners and affiliates spend their time well, we’ve caught up with Danish design heavyweight, Johannes Torpe, the award-winning, prolific and thoroughly versatile Creative Director at multidisciplinary design studio, Johannes Torpe studios.

With an upbringing in a Danish hippie commune, zero formal education to speak of and a background in drumming, lighting and nightclub management, Johannes Torpe’s road to success has been fairly unorthodox. Nevertheless, his characteristically bold and personal design signature is detectable across the design spectrum. From ‘third spaces’ like legendary Copenhagen nightclub Nasa to Creative Direction at national, Danish design institution B&O, Johannes has had a hand in realizing projects for some of world’s most prestigious clients through his own, critically acclaimed, eponymous enterprise.

Unreservedly confident that Johannes could teach us a thing or two about spending time to the best of our ability, we sat down with him for an outspoken conversation about skipping stones and the Johannes Torpe approach to creativity.

Could you start out by explaining the idea behind your holistic approach and ‘the skipping stone?’

I think the skipping stone is a really cool metaphor. In terms of fertilizing story-telling, it’s awesome. What it means is that you throw a stone at the water at a certain angle to make It skip, and hit the water again and again, causing ripples where it comes into contact with the water. You don’t know how it’s going to hit, at what angle and how big the ripples will be. That’s how life works and how my approach to creativity works. You never know what sort of impact your work will have, how it affects people and how it can take you further. At the moment, I’m actually doing a PHD entitled The Skipping Stone. I don’t have any formal education, so on some levels doing a PHD is kind of idiotic. But what I’ve always been good at it translating complexity to a wider audience in a simple way, so that people can go: ‘Ah ok, so that’s what that means. I thought it was complicated.’ The point of doing this PHD is to make it so universally understandable that anyone can pick it up and get inspired.

It sounds like you’re also driven by rendering complexity simple and mediating it to the wider public?

Yes, definitely. And trying to look ahead of the curve to see what’s going to be relevant in 3-5 years.

How do you go about doing that? Is it in an intuitive hunch?

It’s all very intuitive. Either it works or it doesn’t. Adding to that, for me, it’s about balance. About balancing the good things with the bad things. Recently, an Australian journalist asked me how I coped with all the pressures of directing major design projects. I told her: ‘Well, I’m extremely comfortable being uncomfortable.’ I don’t have a problem asking all the unpleasant questions.

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