The Liminal Region

The edge city

Malmö sits at an edge. Geographically, historically, and commercially, it is a city that has never fully belonged to one system. Skåne was Danish territory for centuries before it became Swedish, and that history is still legible in the landscape, the surnames, and the particular tension between the two sides of the Øresund. Two countries. One bridge. One labour market. And two cultures with fundamentally different relationships to how decisions get made.

A liminal space, in the strict sense, is a threshold: the place between what was and what is becoming. It is uncomfortable by definition, because it belongs fully to neither state. Cities that occupy that position commercially tend to develop a specific kind of practical intelligence - the ability to operate across frames without being reduced to either one. Malmö has that quality. It is not quite Swedish in its cultural logic, not quite Danish, and increasingly not quite either in its commercial character.

That ambiguity, which can read as instability from the outside, is the thing that makes it interesting to work from. A practice built on reading the gap between what a business intends and what a customer experiences is well-suited to a city that has always lived inside that kind of gap.

What IKEA gave me

I arrived here from a specific trajectory. A decade in London as Creative Director at Pomegranate, working across brand, service design, and digital strategy. Then a sabbatical that ended with an unexpected call: IKEA Marketing and Communication, Älmhult. Seven years inside one of the most studied companies in the world, working across design management, UX, and interior strategy. That sequence gave me something I could not have planned: a direct understanding of both the corporate architecture and the agency logic, and a clear view of where each one fails.

What IKEA gave me, above all, was proximity to the Scandinavian model at scale. The flat hierarchy. The consensus culture. The genuine belief that the best outcome emerges from collective intelligence rather than singular authority. These are cultural convictions rooted in a specific intellectual history.

The Scandinavian participatory design tradition, which traces back to co-operative design projects in Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 70s, is one of the intellectual roots of what the world now calls Design Thinking. Tim Brown and IDEO codified the method and gave it commercial language. The substrate was already here. Co-creation is embedded in the culture of this region as a structural assumption, present long before it became a methodology.

I am Italian. In Italy, I am considered quiet. Here, I am one of the more direct voices in most rooms. A decade in London was useful preparation. The English share something with the Swedes in their resistance to open confrontation, and working in that environment taught me to deliver a clear point of view without creating a cultural incident. The skill is in calibrating the delivery so the substance lands without triggering the reflex to protect harmony at the expense of clarity.

The substrate

The UTOPIA project is one of the clearest early examples of what participatory design looks like when taken seriously. Developed in the early 1980s as a Nordic collaboration, the project brought together workers, researchers, and institutions across Sweden and Denmark, including key contributors from Aarhus University and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The name itself is an acronym shared across Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Workers and researchers designed their own tools together, producing outcomes that predate most of the frameworks now sold as innovation methodology.¹

This matters commercially, because businesses in this region carry a latent capacity for co-creation that many other markets have to build from scratch. The instinct toward collaboration is present. The difficulty sits on the other side of that instinct, in the moments when a decision needs to be made and the room is still looking for full agreement.

Both of those things are true simultaneously, and a practice operating in this region needs to be comfortable with both sides of the tension. The methodology I work with is co-creative by design, which fits the collaborative instincts of the Öresund. It also requires someone to distinguish the moments when consensus is building something real from the moments when it is deferring a necessary conclusion.

Where the gap appears

The Integrated Commercial Architecture model I work with maps three domains simultaneously: the market need, the solution the business is building, and the commercial architecture that has to sustain both. Every strategic option passes tests of desirability, feasibility, and viability. Failing one disqualifies it regardless of strength in the other two.

The region's businesses are well-supplied with strategic thinking and design capability. The gap tends to appear between what the strategy says and what the customer actually experiences. Naming that gap - and doing so in a way the room can receive - requires both a methodology and a specific kind of cultural fluency. The elephant is visible to most people present. The cultural contract often makes it difficult to point at it directly.

This is where the Italian-in-Malmö position turns out to be useful. I am not inside the cultural contract. I did not grow up with the implicit rules about how dissent is expressed, how authority is acknowledged, how decisions are signalled rather than stated. I learned the rules as a second language, which means I can use them deliberately rather than reflexively. I can point at the elephant with enough warmth that the room does not close, and enough directness that the diagnosis does not get softened into something comfortable but useless.