UK based Swede, Magnus Larsson stayed at the capsule version of Creators Inn by Elvine at LAT, while in Gothenburg to give a speech at TEDxGöteborg. Interview and a previously recorded TED presentation video found after the jump.

How would you describe yourself for someone that have never met you?
I’m an architect who used to be – and still occasionally dabbles as – a journalist and a copywriter. My DNA was tested a few years ago for an article, and having seen those results, I know that I’m excruciatingly boring, the most common man on the planet: no interesting major diseases, an ever-so-slightly-above average tendency for rheumatic problems, and a lineage that makes me 1/25 Ethiopian jew. I’m the same as everyone, really.

What is creativity for you?
Creativity is the combined act of making yourself receptive to the usually sudden realisation that something is potentially possible, followed by the stubborn actualisation of that something. I believe, with Tibor Kalman, that everything is an experiment: if you actually pause to look at things, it’s very hard to not be inspired by them. In that way, pausing is creativity. But you also have to let go of that pause button. The people at TBWA/Chiat Day and Apple got it wrong: it’s not about thinking different. It’s about thinking-and-acting different, though of course that hasn’t got quite the same ring to it. To stay in the world of advertising slogans, creativity is the whole chain: Think different > Go create > Just do it. Remember “Tank Man,” the unknown Chinese rebel who stopped with his bags of groceries in front of the tank in the Tiananmen Square in 1989 and refused to move? That’s creativity.

What was your reason for visiting Gothenburg, and what did you do during your time here?
I was invited to give a TEDx talk about my proposal to build a 6,000km long habitable wall made from biologically solidified sand across the African continent as a way of potentially stopping desertification in its tracks. I ended up staying in a capsule hotel and talking about not only this artificial sandstone wall, but also one of my first and one of my latest architecture projects, what I mean by Radical Optimism, and why I hate umbrellas.

You are an architect yourself. What did you think about the capsule version of Creators Inn by Elvine and the overall idea and design behind the LAT space at Lindholmen?
I think it’s a beautifully realised act of maximising the possibilities of a space – but above all I applaud the programmatic idea of fusing a flat with an office with a music studio with a hotel. As soon as you grasp how it works, you realise that a lot of love has gone into the creation of this interior intervention. It’s quite mad, in the best sense of that word, and it’s a true love hotel, in the proper sense of that word.

You have proposed an idea called “Dune” on how to stop desertification that has gained lots of attention around the world. Could you please shortly explain what it’s all about
A proposal was made about five years ago to mitigate against desertification in the Sahara/Sahel region of Africa through the planting of a massive shelterbelt of trees right across Africa, from Mauritania in the west to Djibouti in the east. My proposal seeks to add a supportive-habitable architectural layer to this shelterbelt, in order to help protect the trees from the forces of nature and the threat of people chopping them down. My suggestion is that we could use the bacterium Bacillus Pasteurii to solidify the existing sand dunes into sandstone structures, which would potentially be a comparatively cheap way of creating such a very long and very narrow pan-African anti-desertification city; a sand-stopping device made out of sand, a way of using the desert itself to stop it from pushing further south.

Magnus speech at a previous TED event.

You told us that you did “Dune” as your degree project as part of your architectural education, but that your teachers failed you. How did that happened?
I worked rather hard for a year to come up with this proposal, but by the end of it – in fact, on the very last day of that year – the panel of tutors that I presented it to considered the project a failure. Dune then went on to win the first prize of 15,000 dollars at the Holcim awards, get endorsed on Bldgblog by Geoff Manaugh (whom I believe to be the best architecture critic in the world), and catch the attention of the organisers of TEDGlobal, who invited me to present it on stage in Oxford in July 2009. This in turn gave birth to several invitations to give Pecha Kucha talks, as well as a string of articles in publications such as Wired, the BBC, the LA Times, Slashdot, Above Magazine, and so on. Whereas it is obviously wrong to judge the opinion of the initial panel based on the project’s latter success, it does remain the same project. There seems to be a logical gap between the school’s response and that of the rest of the world. Whether that is due to a problem with my scheme or with the school’s criteria for success, I leave for others to decide. Failure is in the eye of the critic – but also in the eye of the person behind what is being criticised. It is always easy to pick something apart; if you want something to fail, you can be a radical pessimist and make it fail. But you can also be a radical optimist and imagine how it might work and how it might make the world a better or more interesting place. Personally, I have very little time for the pessimists.

What are your plans for the future?
First, I’ll work out a way of making sure that Dune continues to live on in some form and at some scale. I’m talking to several different companies about different ways of getting the necessary research done in order to be able to build with what is potentially a new cementitious material, a way of building with plastic stone. Then, there will be more projects like Dune, but also more projects in other veins. I’m currently trying to work out whether to cut my hair and get a job, or whether I should pursue a different and more individual path. I think I’d feel at home in a design studio at the intersection point between Yves Behar’s fuseproject, J. Mayer H’s office in Berlin, Bjarke Ingels’s BIG, and some seriously innovative research unit at the MIT. A studio that doesn’t hesitate to treat open-minded entrepreneurs well and use their money to change the world. If that sounds like a description of your company, I’m all ears. But I guess I’ll probably have to set it up myself.

For the autumn & winter collection 2009-2010 Elvine invited the Gothenburg-based street artist EKTA to design some prints.

A look at EKTA’s work quickly reveals the fun and humor that he injects in every piece with his use of characters and settings, even if a darker tone hovers just beneath. Don’t call him a graffiti artist: EKTA describes himself as a painter, whose art brings life to the streets of Gothenburg, and in exhibitions all over Europe.

Click here to check out the EKTA pimped web shop including the prints by EKTA.

On a hot summer day Elvine invited some friends, including some previous Creators Inn by Elvine guests, to spray paint the cover of 5000 Elvine brand booklets. The booklet includes a section about Creators Inn and some interviews with previous guests (pages 42-51). It will soon be up for grabs in a clothing store near you. Until then, feel free to check out The Making of-video above and browse through the online version below.

Multi-talented and Tokyo based Swede, Michael Thorsby aka PMKFA, stayed at the capsule version of Creators Inn by Elvine at LAT, while in Gothenburg to play records and showcase some animations at club Colors, Nefertiti. More pictures and a previously recorded video interview found after the jump.

Who is PMKFA and what do you do?
I’m a graphic designer and also co-founder of the graphic clothing label It’s Our Thing that operates out of Tokyo and Osaka.

You are based in Tokyo, but this was your first time staying in a “capsule hotel”. How was it, and what do you think about the Creators Inn by Elvine concept?
Yeah that felt funny, like crossing the river for water right, haha. I’ve always liked small spaces, more or less lived in small rooms all my life, in fact I always imagine how I would plan it when I enter a small space, like a toilet or storage etc. I draw up imaginary plans on where the sleeping area should be, office, cooking area etc, even when the place is 3-4 square meters. I can recommend it, at least it make visiting public toilets a bit more enjoyable.

The capsules at Creators Inn was first class! I was really impressed, clean, odd shapes (a plus) and enough space for everything needed to sleep well in there and I even managed to reach to work a bit from bed. The minus was that I was there so briefly, I only got to spend something like 5-6 hours there because of my rather tight schedule, very unfortunate. I was stoked though to stay where Scottie B had stayed just a week or to prior to my arrival, I could feel it in the walls, I felt that Bmore gutter feeling.

What was your reason for visiting Gothenburg, and what happened while you were here?
I DJ’ed at the superior club Colors at Nefertiti and had a good time even tough after spending two weeks in the forests of Småland my pulse was still synced to the trees and felt a bit slow bot socially and definately when mixing, but it was great after all and I was very happy to see Mattias who’s organizing the club and some other friends from Gothenburg like the Dahlstrom brothers and my good friend Johanna.

Gothenburg was my second to last stop on my summer holiday that lasted for a month and took me to Greece, south of France, Sweden and Denmark.

Any tips and recommendations for future guests? What’s to like about Gothenburg?
I don’t know really, I don’t think I ever got a good grip about Gothenburg even though I’ve been here quite a few times as my dear brother is living south of the city, but I think it’s nice. As with most Swedish cities people are so excited about the summer, and after trying to deal with the super-humid Japanese summer I miss those beautiful Scandinavian summers with a cool breeze always around the corner.

Do we dare to ask you what PMKFA stands for?
You don’t.

What’s next?
As my holiday is now over another year of hard work lies ahead. Quite intimidating but I also feel very excited as things are really looking good and many good things will happen the coming year. New stuff for It’s Our Thing is in the work and also a brand new PMKFA.com will go live sometime in a not so distant future.

This is a previous video interview with PMKFA about the difference between working creatively in Sweden and Japan, followed by some pictures of Tokyo and his clothing brand It’s out thing below.

Here is a short movie we made to explain Creators Inn by Elvine for some ad people in Stockholm. It’s in Swedish, but we hope to get the time to translate it to english soon.

Mako Ishizuka is a Japanese artist who stayed at the Creators Inn by Elvine lab while in Gothenburg to do an analog VJ set at club Cheesy Not Cheesy. The video clip is only about 20 seconds long because our camera containing the rest of the footage got stolen. We’re sorry about that.

Mako, you are an artist. How do you define creativity?
Sparkling ideas. Otherwise, ”is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. An alternative conception of creativeness is that it is simply the act of making something new.”

You told me Gothenburg reminded you about Amsterdam. How come?
It is due to two aspects: people and cityscape. When I was moving from Amsterdam to Sweden, I was told that I should not speak to strangers as I used to do in Amsterdam – it is common there but if you do it in Sweden, people would look at you as you are weird. I told this to a friend and he told me that I can do it in Göteborg. So I tried it during the weekend I was there, talking to strangers. It worked. I talked to a middle-aged couple, an older lady spoke to me, and I had a long discussion with a taxi driver even after we arrived at my destination. I liked Amsterdam being so generous and open to everybody – and I felt that kind of comfort in Göteborg. Another thing is cityscape. A gallerist I spoke to told me that the city is made by Dutch people so it resembles Dutch cities, with canals and buildings. I saw an old building partially lifted probably because the ground had moved, like many tilted houses around canals in Amsterdam, and it became my favourite building in Gothenburg. Also with its soundscape – with the alarming sound from trams (ding-ding) made me feel as if I was walking on a street in A’dam.

Tell us about your analogue VJ set at club Cheesy Not Cheesy.
I work as a contemporary artist but have never worked as a VJ before. I tried to translate my personality into this practice – with the use of household things and food, which are reflecting my love towards small things in everyday life. I used alphabet biscuits, bubbled water, juice, olive oil, food colouring, dish soap, salad bowl, cup, pie form, straw, etc. to make it organic, playful and colourful. With the use of OHP, you see this micro cosmos magnified and distorted in a way it appears almost surreal – it suited the mood of fun-loving people at the club with a bit of intoxication, I guess. It also had interesting (positive) contrast with the music played. I had so much fun that I want to do it again.

Any other fun projects lined up or any other closing thoughts?
In my art practice, I am working on a project to make a collection of postcards, aiming to recover the romantic idea of travelling, involving other artists, writers, etc., and also a museum in Paris. As my solo project, I have been working with a series of footage made on the street, concerning deciphering accumulated history/story – but it is so cold outside now that I am taking a pause. I will come back to Gothenburg in the end of January to present my practice at Pecha Kucha. I hope I can do projects in Gothenburg some time, and I wanna come back to VJ again!

Phil is a Belgian Dj/producer living in Hamburg who stayed at Creators Inn by Elvine while in Gothenburg to play at legendary night club Neferiti. He’s label manager at Finetunes and also starting up his own label called A room with a view.

We spoke to Phil about his close relationship to Gothenburg and the music scene here, where he mentioned artists like Hird, St Göran, Jor-El, Andreas Saag and Yukimi Nagano, and how staying at Creators Inn by Elvine made him feel like he had come full circle.