Staff at Child Culture Design

Johnny Friberg
Johnny is the founder and head of the MFA program “Child Culture Design” at the University of Gothenburg. His aim is to combine  the subject design and artistic practice with child culture and in-depth knowledge of this specific user-group. He spent eight years working at a research center called Stockholm International Toy Research Centre but has since 2005 been working at the Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg. Johnny´s work and interest besides teaching at the academy includes toy and game design, music, illustration and furniture design. His research interest has evolved around narrative design and designing for play. He has extensive experience in projects using participatory design practices for creating inclusion and empowerment for children in both architectural and product-design contexts. He has also been working with audio-scenography and music for theater and film. Currently Johnny is making play sculptures for a park in Kungsbacka, Sweden.
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Annelies Vaneycken 
Annelies Vaneycken is a designer, teacher, and researcher. In her artistic practice she explores the ways public narratives and interventions enable the empowerment of marginalized groups (including children) through the use of participatory and ethnographic means. Since 2020, she has been teaching at the MFA Design programs at the HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg, and before that at LUCA School of Arts, Brussels (1999-2014). She was a Research Fellow in the 2014-2017 EU Marie Curie project TRADERS, which focused on training art and design researchers in public space participation. In 1999 she co-founded Trans-ID, Studio for Visual Communication Design, where she worked until 2014. Vaneycken obtained an MFA Graphic Design degree from LUCA School of Arts Brussels (1998), MFA Design degree from the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam (2001), and a Ph.D. in Design from the HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg (2020).
Read more about Annelies Vaneycken on her own website

Lieselotte Van Leeuwen
Lieselott´s PhD in developmental psychology at the Radbout University Nijmegen (NL) was about tool use in young children. After that she joined a project at the University hospital in Bern (Switzerland) investigating emerging parent-child interactions using toys. The interface between design and behavior became her main area of interest. Lieselotte joined teams designing multisensory expressive environments for children and elderly with disabilities and also studied play as a lifelong activity. Together with Mathieu Gielen, a designer from TU Delft, she worked on linking concepts from social sciences to design for play. The focus of her current research and teaching is the empowerment of children through design and through participative design processes. The dynamics of affordances, ambiguity and free play are central in that. She is  part of a FORMAS research project called ‘Transforming the city for play: Co-designing and co-crafting urban interventions’ and is a board member of the International Toy Research Association (ITRA).
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Lotta Kvist
Lotta is a designer and senior lecturer at HDK-Valand and has an education in Product Design (BFA) and a masters in Design. She  has been a member of the Child Culture Design team for over 10 years. A holistic approach to teaching and lifelong learning are central keys to Lotta. She is interested in the development of the whole human being, the body, mind, and soul. She practices this approach  both personally and professionally, and in teaching she employs this approach and experience to guide and challenge students within (pedagogical) meetings connected to the creative process. Lotta is engaged in issues regarding creative health and the working environment, such as how to work and thrive in a sustainable way as a designer. Outside of the university, she arranges workshops and retreats and these forms of practices are undoubtedly intertwined with the work she does within the university.
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Christian Strömqvist
Christian is a designer and assistant professor at the Academy of Design and Craft, Faculty of Fine Arts, at the University of Gothenburg. He has a master degree in Child Culture Design, completed in 2011. Christian works with issues revolving around play, the child perspective and participation, with the aim to create meaning through interactions and collaborative processes. He has been working at HDK-Valand since 2013. In the independent alumni organization Play Without Borders, Christian  investigates play and creates play opportunities in a global context. The organization has worked  in Kenya, Uganda and Turkey, as well as in Sweden, and does site-specific projects that aim to highlight the importance of play and working with a child perspective.Christian is also a co-founder of PinPin Studio, which since 2011 has focused on design for play and playfulness. In this constellation, Christian has done a lot of projects with snow and ice as the main material. This includes suites for ICEHOTEL, the design for ICEBAR Stockholm as well as the Kiruna snow playground, which has been built annually in Kiruna since 2015.
Find contact details and read more about Christian Strömqvist