Meet Mats Johansson, the designer behind our interactive designer toy Walter
Walter is an interactive visitor toy. He travels around the world and you can jump into his head and see thought his eyes.
You are probably familiar with the Swedish fashion brand Acne Studios or you might know the international ad agency Acne, but did you know the same group of companies has a toy company spin-off called Acne Jr?
Acne Jr produces popular high quality toys and sell it all over the world, and one of their most popular toys is the designer teddy bear Chester. Together with Acne Jr, we have created a modern version of this toy to tell the world about our Creative Meet Up event on 17 June in Copenhagen.
The result is a yellow designer toy named Walter, with a built-in microphone and video camera.
Watch the video we’ve done on the creation of Walter to get the full picture:
The designer behind the toy is Mats Johansson, an illustrator and toy designer who is running the toy shop Acne Jr together with his wife and designer Sofia Ekvall on Södermalm in Stockholm. He also founded the first Acne company.
“Walter is an interactive visitor toy. He travels around the world and you can jump into his head and see thought his eyes. Toys are evolving all the time, and our ambition is to take traditional toys and give them a modern twist”, says Mats Johansson, who will also do a keynote on how he creates toys at our Creative Meet Up in Copenhagen.
Fun to design for kids
Toys have been the biggest inspiration for Mats since he started as an illustrator in the early 90’s. In his words, “designing for kids is so much fun. I’m finding inspiration in real life, in books, taking a snapshot, a quick sketch on the paper and putting it into the computer. The tools are off course the most important thing to make this possible”, says Mats Johansson.
On his way to this summer’s biggest Nordic creative event
Right now, Walter is travelling from Stockholm to Copenhagen to this summer’s biggest Nordic creative event, and you can stream his point of view on the event online via this website. This means you can follow the event from two angles on the official page: both via the eyes and ears of Walter and via our official online live stream.
Walter will be the fly on the wall for the Nordic creative community
Walter and Adobe Nordic will present a jam-packed agenda with five interesting speakers doing keynotes on design.
At the event there will also be a Creative Jam competition. See a list of all speakers, topics of the keynotes, and all the other activities here.
Walter has a mic and video and is “wearable”.