Swedish Press Sample Feb 2015 Vol 86:01

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February 2015 Vol 86:01 $4.95

Domestic revolution: how Swedish appliances have improved everyday life

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Efva Attling interview Sami national day Electrolux Design Lab awards

The Power of Knowledge Engineering Introducing SKF BeyondZero - a product portfolio designed specifically to reduce negative environmental impact

ATLAS COPCO CELEBRATING 65 YEARS IN CANADA! We wish to thank our valued customers, distributors, suppliers and employees for their contribution in helping us become a leader in sustainable productivity solutions.

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4 Letters to the Editor 5 From the Editor’s Desk

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Swedish Headlines Headline News: Förändringens val granskas News at a Glance Swedes in the News

Business 7 Business News 9 Company File: Sjöstrand

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PRINTED IN CANADA NEXT ISSUE DEADLINE: FEBRUARY 10

Lifestyle 18 Top Sju 19 Art: United Stockholms of America: The Swedes who stayed

Feature 10 How Electrolux and Husqvarna turned the Swedish kitchen upside down Interview 12 Efva Attling: Designed by Life

In the Loop 24 Landskapsnyheterna 27 Canada, US & Beyond 28 Calendar and Events

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Photo © Charlie Bennet

Hemma hos 20 Design: Students design for a healthier, tastier & cleaner future 21 Treats à la Nina 22 Lär Dig Svenska 23 Hot Chocolate – Varm Choklad

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CONTENTS ( February 2015 )

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Swedish Press

29 Ads and Info

Heritage 15 Samernas nationaldag 16 Swedish roots, Oregon lives 17 Maclayhem

30 Sista Ordet Wild Strawberries and Moose Money 31 Press Byrån On the cover: Illustration by Elena Ivanova

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Swedes in the News

Billionaires, Hollywood legends and royal babies Zlatan joins billionaires

Baby on the way for Princess Madeleine

Sweden has 147 billionaires, according to Veckans Affärers annual rich list and for the first time star striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic makes the list, with a fortune estimated at one billion kronor. Ikea’s Ingvar Kamprad tops the list with 550 billion kronor in the bank. While the famous footballer may be happy to have made number 142 on that particular list, he wasn’t at all pleased to have lost the top position in a list of Sweden’s top sports stars to Björn Borg. ‘With all respect to the others, I am number 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 on that list,’ he said.

H.R.H Princess Madeleine and H.R.H. Princess Leonore. Photo: Ewa-Marie Rundquist / Kungahuset.se

Photo: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian

Hammarskjöld enquiry The U.N. is set to open a new investigation into the mysterious death of 1962 Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. New evidence suggesting foul play will be examined by a panel of experts, as the U.N. called on any nation with information about his death to disclose it. Hammarskjöld died when a Swedish DC-6 airliner crashed into a forest

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rincess Madeleine has announced that she and her husband Christopher O’Neill are expecting their second baby in the summer. Their first child, Leonore, was born in New York in February 2014, but the next baby may well be born in Sweden as the couple have made their base in Stockholm while they decide where in Europe to live.

on its way to the then British colony of Northern Rhodesia.

At the time, the crash was blamed on pilot error but recent evidence suggests the diplomat could have been shot down by separatist mercenaries from Kantanga in Congo.

Marcimain nominated

Gentlemen, a film by Mikael Marcimain based on the novel by Klas Östergren, was recently nominated for a record number of Guldbagge awards – Sweden’s equivalent of the Oscars.

The awards ceremony is held on January 26th and the film, which is about a writer who hides out in a Stockholm apartment, has been nominated in 13 different categories, including Best Film and Best Director.

Anita Ekberg dies Swedish actress Anita Ekberg, best known for her iconic role in the Federico Fellini movie ‘La Dolce Vita’, has died aged 83 in a hospital in Rome. Born and raised in Malmö, she achieved success in Hollywood after winning the Miss Sweden contest in 1950, and starred in films including ‘War and Peace’ and ‘Intervista.’

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Company File

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f you’ve ever hankered after the convenience of a capsule coffee machine, but been put off by the wastage of all those empty plastic capsules, a new Swedish family-owned company could be the answer to your coffee dilemma. The idea for a sustainable espresso machine concept came to Jenny Svensson and Niklas Gustafsson in 2011 when, shortly after buying a Nespresso machine, they realised how unsustainable the design was. ‘We thought: it must be possible to do it smarter,’ says Jenny.

So, after a couple of years of research and development they launched their own Sjöstrand Coffee Concept Espresso Machine, with its unique completely biodegradable coffee capsules, in 2014. The company, which is run from the couple’s home on Ingarö in the Stockholm archipelago, combines the intrinsically Swedish values of excellent, pure, functional design, a desire to make everyday life simpler and more convenient, an environmental conscience – and a passion for good coffee.

The designers of the sleek espresso machine are industrial designers Carl Ljung and Jonas

Groth. The machine is made of polished stainless steel and is designed to be timeless and functional, with nods to both Scandinavian minimalism and classic Italian coffee bar machines.

Finding someone to produce the biodegradable capsules proved to be far more difficult. ‘We were a hair’s breadth away from giving up,’ says Jenny, ‘We had looked everywhere, flying backwards and forwards across Europe.’ But in late 2013, they suddenly came across a Swiss company called The Ethical Coffee Company, who were already producing fully biodegradable capsules, made from starch and plant fibres, which break down in nature within six months.

They signed a contract shortly afterwards and now produce four different espresso blends, available to order online at sjostrandcoffee.se as well as in Granit interiors and home storage stores in Sweden, Norway and Finland and in At Home stores in South Africa. The espresso machines, which currently retail at 2495 SEK, can also be bought this way, and the company is ‘slowly but solidly’ growing into other markets, including Australia, Switzerland and New Zealand.

‘People will never stop consuming, so it’s important to find smarter alternatives,’ says Jenny. ‘That’s our core value, to make our products as sustainable as possible.’

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Meat grinders and Harry Martinson’s food processor:

How Electrolux and Husqvarna turned the Swedish kitchen upside down

By Malin Dunfors

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n 1965, Swedes became acquainted with a whole new type of margarine. It didn’t need to soften, and came in a convenient container that fitted perfectly in the rack on the inside of a refrigerator door.

These futuristic features were demonstrated by a man dressed in a white lab coat, as part of an ad in “The Year was 1965” (“Året var 1965”). It’s an episode from Swedish public television’s popular documentary series about the fifties and the sixties with Olle Häger.

Fast-forward to 2020 and every tenth kitchen appliance will be controlled remotely by a cellphone – at least according to Jan Brockmann, Chief Technology Officer at Electrolux. “Everyone wants to cook

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The royal vacuum cleaner

1912 Lux vacuum cleaner

like a proper chef with professional equipment, and that’s where smart kitchen appliances come in. An oven that has the recipe and knows how to cook the food. It makes us proud when we can treat people to wellprepared food, just like a professional chef,” says Brockmann in an interview with Svenska Dagbladet Näringsliv.

For Electrolux, the future lies in smart household appliances, explains Brockmann. Svenska Dagbladet cites numbers showing that in 2020, this new market will be worth somewhere between $28 to $35 million.

Connected kitchen equipment is a far cry from the beginning of the twentieth century – and the first electrical household appliance, the vacuum cleaner. Electrolux began making the first Swedish-produced vacuum cleaner, Lux I, in 1912.

Hygiene was the buzzword of its time and the early vacuum cleaners were meant to ease the workload for maids and housewives. Lux I became so successful that it was even used at Stockholm’s Royal Palace for carpetcleaning.

In 1938, Electrolux introduced a streamlined model of its popular vacuum cleaner, the Z 30, which earned the nickname “limpan.” 46 years later, it became immortalized on a stamp.

Food-processing becomes a concept

One of Electrolux’s most beloved products, the food-processor “Assistent Original,” launched in 1940.

Civil engineer Alvar Lenning had been given the enviable task of redeveloping Assistent Original from a food-processor made for big kitchens into a smaller model suitable for Swedish home cooking. Lenning knew what he was doing and soon, foodprocessing was on everyone’s lips.

A testimonial from an early Original-owner, Mrs M Tengvald in Åmsele, reads: “The construction is very wellthought through, yes one is even tempted to use the word genius. I would consider it as a good deed if I could persuade some of the fathers here in the countryside to buy it and thus, ease their housewives’ heavy work load.”

One such father, Swedish author Harry Martinson, bought the 100 001:st Original 1957 as a Christmas present for his wife Ingrid.

Ice-cream, stoves and meat grinders

During the seventies, the Electrolux group began a period of large expansion and incorporated Husqvarna.

Husqvarna, founded in the heart of

Småland in 1689, is another Swedish company who over the decades have equipped households with innovative appliances, such as electrical frying pans and ice-cream machines.

The company also brought the iron stove to the common Swede.

When the stove came from America in 1874, Husqvarna established a foundry and began manufacturing.

After the iron stove came the wood and the gas stoves, and in 1921, the first electrical stove saw the light of day. But the meat grinder became Husqvarna’s absolute best-seller and sold in more than 12 million copies all over the world.

It’s called “funkiskök”

Stockholm’s Nordiska Museet currently hosts the exhibition “Homes

and interiors” (“Hem och bostad”), which spans nearly half a millennium of Swedish furniture and interior design. The exhibit features a “funkiskök,” a typical kitchen from the fifties, whose design both revolutionized the nature of household work and how Swedes viewed their kitchens.

Accessibility, hygiene and practicality characterized these new standard kitchens, drawing their inspiration from across the Atlantic.

American household experts had already in the 1910s written books where they compared household work to engineering, giving it equal importance.

The Swedish kitchens were designed according to the principles of a factory assembly line, where the woman (almost always in those days) would first go to the pantry and the refrigerator to get her ingredients, then rinse them in the sink and prepare them at the work station, before finally cooking them on the stove.

The goal was to mass produce these kitchens to enable all Swedes to have a great and cheap kitchen.

“When you’re thinking about tearing out your [old] kitchen and throwing it on the street, keep in mind that behind the design are decades of kitchen research aimed at making household work easier and more practical,” says Maria Perers, superintendent at Nordiska Museet in a presentation.

Photo: Peter Segemark, Nordiska museet.

Photos on page 10 © Electrolux

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[Lifestyle]

Top Sju

spectators in a giant igloo will witness one of this year’s most exciting musical collaborations, when musicians from Austin, Texas and Luleå take part in the second ever Ice Music festival. The series of concerts, which runs from January 16 to March 23, are all played on instruments made of ice in an ice hall kept at a constant temperature of -5C.

that’s the number of new Swedish words that have been added to the Swedish Language Council’s (Språkrådet) list of popular words from the past year.

In 2014, the words include several technology-related English loan words, such as ‘fotobomba’, ‘usie’ (a selfie with several participants) and ‘mobilzombie’ (see this month’s Maclayhem!).

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was the hottest year ever recorded in Sweden, according to meteorologists from Swedish weather agency SMHI. The mean daily temperature for the country was between 6.85 and 6.9 C, compared to the previous record of 6.73C in 1934. Temperatures as high as 27.8C were recorded in the Kiruna region, above the Arctic Circle, in July.

Sweden has been ranked as the fifth best country in the world for business, according to Forbes magazine. Coming in behind Denmark, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Ireland, Sweden was praised for their ‘enviable standard of living under a mixed system of hightech capitalism and extensive welfare benefits.’

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2016 a new digital database archiving the US Swedishlanguage newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries should be available to the general public from late 2016, thanks to a joint international project involving the National Swedish Library in Stockholm, the American Swedish Institute, the Minnesota Historical Society, and the Swenson Swedish Immigration Research Center.

2 A new report released as part of the recent United Nations Climate Conference in Peru rated Sweden as the second best country in the world for tackling climate change. Sweden was praised for cutting pollution from homes; the country’s emissions have reduced by 70% over the last five years. Denmark received the highest score in the world.

10 years ago in December marked the anniversary of the tsunami disaster which claimed 543 Swedish lives, more than any other disaster in modern Swedish history. The anniversary was marked in Sweden by a memorial service held by the church and the royal family at Uppsala Cathedral on December 26th.

Photo: Sara Strandlund

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Photo: Graeme Richardson

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The country’s excellent communications and highly skilled labour force were also mentioned.

[Lifestyle] Art

United Stockholms of America: The Swedes who Stayed

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n his work with the photo project “United Stockholms of America” New York based Swedish photographer Charlie Bennet travelled among the communities in the U.S. that carry the Swedish capital’s name, documenting wildly varying degrees of Swedishness.

Most of these towns are now sparsely populated, desolate yet beautiful places that have little in common with Stockholm in Sweden. In the south of Texas only a sandy graveyard remains, while Stockholm, Minnesota is a shadow of it’s former self. But in Anderson’s Store in Maine, however, one can meet gentlemen with Swedish sounding names like Lundqvist, Anderson and Bondeson. One of them even speaks Swedish. Another Stockholm, in Wisconsin, is now a beautiful tourist destination that attracts visitors in droves.

The photography is accompanied by accounts from writers Gabriel Mellqvist and Anna Maria Bernitz. The book ‘United Stockholms of America’ (Votum) is available online in English at Amazon.com or in Swedish at Adlibris.com or any Swedish book store.

The exhibit is currently running at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis until February, after that it will be shipped to NYC to open in March and in September in Philadelphia.

Visit www.unitedstockholmsofamerica.com for more information.

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