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About me



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I'm an Independent Consultant doing work in the Social Media business. I'm the geek who doesn't program, the dad who is a "mother", the leader who is not a manager, the innovator who is not an entrepreneur, the creative mind who dropped design, the kind guy who yells at you, the "bear" with a temper, the socializer who likes to stay alone for weeks, the guy who will question anything and feels comfortable with change and insecurity. I'm a reader, a writer, a communicator. I'm absorbed in my interests and I need new challenges to thrive on.

My name Is Gunnar Langemark. I'm 43, have a wife and two girls, and live in Denmark some 25 miles northwest of central Copenhagen in Frederikssund where they have the Viking plays each summer.

Here's a little more about me:

I hold an MA in Film, Media and Rhetoric from University of Copenhagen. My last job was at a local IT company (ComputerCamp)- where I was involved in Company Strategy, Client Strategy consulting, Presales, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Application Design, Project Management, Process design and so on. I actually did a lot of different things.

The story is this: My major thesis was in the semiotics of computer graphics. I had done some work on computer games at that time, and I had joined a couple of organizations. I was a board member of the Danish chapters of IICS (International Interactive Communications Society) and of ITVA (MCA today). I had found out about Wurman and Don Norman at the time, and Jakob Nielsen was also active (late eighties to ninety). I felt quite inspired by their thoughts.

My first qualified job after graduating was to develop a new Multi-Media and Marketing education, and teach CD-ROM production. The education - which was the first of its kind in Denmark - was a huge success and still is.
After that I did a contract job doing technology assessment on Virtual Reality for the Danish parliamentary board of technology. Next I did a speaking tour, before joining the university again on a Ph.D. program with a project on Youth Culture and Computer Media. I did some consulting for the State Department and for the LEGO group among others. I left the Ph.D program - i gained a family in exchange, and took a job as a creative project manager - producing a very successful childrens game, and then producing computer based training. That was before the term e-learning was coined.

The company that i worked for was then bought by Oracle. I had been working on a content structuring and delivery model based on granulated content objects. This model fit well into the vision of a certain Oracle application which was being developed at the time. We build more than 100 hours worth of e-learning content based on the model - only to discover that the web based application had a serious flaw. It didn't scale properly. The group of people I was in was fired. (Now we are talking the beginning of 2000. I still didn't know that I was doing information architecture all the time. I had chosen to promote the very issues of organised content and user centrism for years without really knowing that it could be "named" like that. I always thought that I was doing a lot of things at the same time - now I know I was only doing one! ;-)).

I did a year of independent consulting on e-learning, communication and structuration - while the dot.com bubble burst, the funding fizzled and clients folded. Then my mother died and I was offered a "real" job as a Senior Information Architect with a major Web Consulting firm: Paris based Valtech. I gratefully accepted the offer. Now I realized that I had a fitting title, a great many interesting projects and not really the energy to successfully pursue the opportunities at hand. We made some flops and some successes. I did a major bank site with great success while at Valtech. I also took responsibility of the interaction design on a pension fund web application - enabling users to "massage" their info in different ways to show possible outcomes of their actions. This was a very cool project!

Then things turned gloomy. We had eight straight months with firing rounds before I decided to leave Valtech voluntarily. At that time management had achieved nothing short of dismantling a great communications department of more than 80 people, and reducing it to around 8 people.
Fortunately I was able to easily land a job as internet consultant in a small company five minutes from my home (the only IT related company in town). There I have a broad range of responsibilities, and IA is one of them. I have much more of a say, and I can spend time on strategy both with clients and internally. That fits me. I do miss some of the major clients though, and I do not have as much opportunity to travel and to network as I had before. I have been there since October 2001, and it is by far the most satisfying job I have ever had.

If you want to know more, you could do a search on AlltheWeb or perhaps you would prefer to Google me, to learn more about who I am, what I do, and where I am active on the web and elsewhere.

Here's some info on me and my world:

Denmark in Europe is where I live:
What's going on in Denmark?
Want to visit Denmark?
What's going on in Europe?

Talking about one of my favorite subjects - ME:

100 things in danish
100 things in english
Naturally I also took some tests on the web - so while we're at it here are the results: My Bloginality is ENFP.
My enneagram test result were not entirely flattering, but I found a good explanation so...
My big five test result was not that bad, though it shows that I'm not exactly a humble person.
Blogger Code: B3 d+ t+ k++ s++ u f i+ o x e l+ c--
I took the morality test and guess what: Check out my Morality! 77% liberal, 23% conservative
My Political Compass Economic Left/Right: -5.00
Authorita./Libertar.: -4.36

Which means I'm Ghandi and Mandela. Probably not so. I live in Denmark where social responsibility is taught in kindergarden (ok - so I never went to kindergarden - nevertheless) - so you don't see much of the right wing conservative world view the way you see it in the USA.
Actually I took the "what famous leader are you" test - and guess what:

On another note, I have an Amazon Wish List, if you should feel inclined.

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