The private gathering brought together a handful of architects and creatives, who took their seats in our upcoming Tribal Sofa while experiencing notes of #Skin7, a room fragrance by Nadilakai premiering at our exhibition, Just Because. 

Looking back, the conversation almost felt like an extension of the exhibition’s process. 

Rikke sees it as the courage to put yourself into play. Doubt can appear. She says she can’t really explain it, she can just feel it. There is something about a core, she adds. An anthropological way of entering things. Being part of it. Observing, but without losing yourself. 

Rikke Skytte is a behavioral and futures researcher, designer and communicator. Her work spans more than two decades across performing arts, design and anthropology. Her way of working is a combination of scientific knowledge, practical experience and intuition, all existing at the same time. 

Arne immediately recognizes the feeling. 

"For me, it's a signal. Suddenly it's there. Why? I don't know. There's just a message." When something arrives, he moves with it immediately. "I don't doubt it." He pauses, then adds that this way of working can seem provocative. But trying to make everyone happy is often where things go wrong. "When you're designing for someone who isn't yourself, you get lost. And in the end, nobody becomes truly happy." 

Iben nods. "When people-pleasing, you end up not reaching anyone. But if you dare to stand in something, you reach some." 

Rikke sees it as a willingness to put yourself on the line. "We want to belong. That's human. But if you stand in yourself, you're actually much clearer." 

An underlying theme of this year's exhibition is fear of judgement. Both judgement from others, but maybe also the way we judge ourselves before anyone else has a chance to. Iben turns the conversation in that direction. "When have you experienced the most resistance?" 

"Generally?" Arne replies. "My whole life." 

Laughter fills the room. 

Arne has a way of making people feel comfortable. His energy creates a kind of spaciousness between people. The conversation never feels formal. Perhaps the sofas, scent and colors help too. 

He continues. "Janteloven is actually one of the easiest things to free yourself from. Most often, the person enforcing it on you is yourself.” You can decide to free yourself from it, he explains. At first, people may think you're weird, questioning what you're doing. "But if you don't shake, if you keep being yourself, on the other side you meet an enormous amount of love." And, he adds, something else happens too: others begin to feel freer as well. 

When Iben asks about fear of judgement, Rikke immediately notices something. 

"I actually started by judging myself." Moments earlier she had described herself as someone who wasn’t classically trained. "But that was me judging myself." She explains that she has learned to rest in the complexity of who she is. Education, experience and human qualities exist side by side. Maybe age plays a role, she reflects. 

But she also points to the design industry. Design is deeply connected to observation. We step back and look. And when we observe, we also judge. "There is a lot of judgement in this industry." Especially in places with strong design traditions, she explains. Heritage can become inspiration, but it can also become a constraint. 

Rikke adds that intuition is deeply human, almost like something primitive we’ve always carried. But something has shifted. Today, she says, we can hardly find our way without GPS. As if we’ve “sat back in the bus” and left behind parts of our own human superpowers. For the past centuries, she continues, value has been placed on knowledge, proof and facts, on what can be measured and verified. Who is knowledgeable? What can we prove? And because of that, something happens when intuition enters the conversation. It creates resistance. It unsettles the logic. But in reality, she says, intuition is something we have relied on for thousands of years to survive. 

She recognizes it clearly when she works with large organizations. When she encourages people to sense into direction, to ask whether something actually feels right, there is often a pause. Sometimes a CEO looks at her as if to say: what is she talking about? And then the interpretation comes. That she must be “very spiritual.” But it’s not spiritual to hear. It is part of the work. Brand development, behavior, decision-making, all of it also requires intuition. 

Iben reflects on how judgement often says more about ourselves than the thing we are judging. "When you catch yourself judging something, it's interesting to ask why. What is it inside me that makes me judge this?" 

Arne nods.

The question hangs in the room. 

For Iben, intuition has played a significant role in her journey with NORR11. There have been many moments where the reaction was immediate. "We can't do that." And yet the feeling remained. "We have to." 

When she joined NORR11, the brand already existed, and most of the designs already existed. But her approach became one of curiosity, almost like raising a child, she describes, asking “Who are you?” And then do everything you can to bring that out.

Later she describes how the exhibition developed. There was no fixed marketing strategy behind it, the process was allowed to evolve naturally on its own. She explains that this is what happens when you stop trying to control every outcome. Intuition starts leading the process somewhere unexpected. "And suddenly you could feel it. Suddenly there was something." And that is where the unthought appears, not as a lack of direction, but as something that could never have been carefully planned from the beginning, only discovered along the way. 

Arne describes how disconnection from yourself often becomes visible in conversation. "Sometimes I'm talking to someone and I think: come on, I can't feel you. I can only hear what you learned in school." Identity and presence matter. Being connected to yourself matters.