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Employing the Foucauldian term ‘conduct’, this article explores how social resilience and morale became a target of state intervention in Denmark during the Cold War. ‘Psychological defence’ was a Cold War phenomenon designed to bring an imagined future war into a space of control as well as a tool for the authorities’ exercise of power in case another world war became a reality. Advocating a methodological internationalism, the article analyses how the concept of psychological defence travelled from Sweden to Denmark via Norway and NATO, and in a complex process of translation, mixing and hybridization was adapted and appropriated to Danish security policy conditions, preparedness culture, and historical experiences. Ultimately, psychological defence was replaced with a more practical or even cynical approach to public information and media preparedness, even if the objectives remained the same. The article employs source material from Danish, Swedish, and NATO archives and combines Scandinavian Cold War history with media history and the history of knowledge.

Hur formar vi framtiden och hur lär vi oss av historien? Vilken roll spelar konsten i ett framtida samhälle, hur fungerar framsynthet inom ekonomi och juridik, och hur kan framtidens komplexa forskningsresultat förmedlas och spridas till samhället utanför akademin? LU Futura var Lunds universitets tvärvetenskapliga tankesmedja för framtidsfrågor 2018-2021. Framtidskompasser är projektets slutpunkt, där deltagarna diskuterar framtidsfrågor inom sina specialområden. Essäerna handlar bland annat om våra växande avfallsberg, om vad beredskapen under kalla kriget kan lära oss i dagens krigsdiskussioner, om hur mänsklig hälsa förhåller sig till planetens välmående – och inte minst om vilka förhoppningar och farhågor dagens studentgeneration hyser inför framtiden.

In the 1959 edition of its furniture catalogue, the Swedish design company IKEA praised the new medium of television. Television promised to work wonders for the home and its owners. Just three years after the launch of official broadcasts and one year after its commercial breakthrough spurred by Sweden’s hosting of the 1958 FIFA World Cup, television ownership skyrocketed. Television, however, was not simply a new technological device. It was culturally constructed as a natural element in living room design, amounting to a spatial innovation reconfiguring the micro-geography of the home. The vocabulary of rebirth and renaissance used in the IKEA catalogue also underlined a clear and definite break with homes of the past. In the new Swedish home, television was, in the words of Cecelia Tichi, the ‘electronic hearth’ around which the family gathered. More than an added piece of technology, it created a new domestic environment. This chapter is inspired by a material perspective on communication and explores media devices or furniture—home objects that are designed for, or are in themselves, media technologies. It includes everything from bookcases, radio or television cabinets and telephone tables to desks, computer or iPad stands, and mobile phone chargers. Empirically, the chapter investigates the original Swedish editions of the IKEA catalogue from 1951 over a period of seventy years to its final print edition in 2021. All catalogues have been analysed, examining both the visual and textual content as well as the relationship between image and text in the page layout. The aim is to chart the spaces populated by media in the IKEA home and how they changed over this seventy-year period. What are the media life cycles in the choreography of the IKEA home? In what way did media matter?

In the 1959 edition of its furniture catalogue, the Swedish design company IKEA praised the new medium of television. Television promised to work wonders for the home and its owners. Just three years after the launch of official broadcasts and one year after its commercial breakthrough spurred by Sweden’s hosting of the 1958 FIFA World Cup, television ownership skyrocketed. Television, however, was not simply a new technological device. It was culturally constructed as a natural element in living room design, amounting to a spatial innovation reconfiguring the micro-geography of the home. The vocabulary of rebirth and renaissance used in the IKEA catalogue also underlined a clear and definite break with homes of the past. In the new Swedish home, television was, in the words of Cecelia Tichi, the ‘electronic hearth’ around which the family gathered. More than an added piece of technology, it created a new domestic environment. This chapter is inspired by a material perspective on communication and explores media devices or furniture—home objects that are designed for, or are in themselves, media technologies. It includes everything from bookcases, radio or television cabinets and telephone tables to desks, computer or iPad stands, and mobile phone chargers. Empirically, the chapter investigates the original Swedish editions of the IKEA catalogue from 1951 over a period of seventy years to its final print edition in 2021. All catalogues have been analysed, examining both the visual and textual content as well as the relationship between image and text in the page layout. The aim is to chart the spaces populated by media in the IKEA home and how they changed over this seventy-year period. What are the media life cycles in the choreography of the IKEA home? In what way did media matter?

In the 1959 edition of its furniture catalogue, the Swedish design company IKEA praised the new medium of television. Television promised to work wonders for the home and its owners. Just three years after the launch of official broadcasts and one year after its commercial breakthrough spurred by Sweden’s hosting of the 1958 FIFA World Cup, television ownership skyrocketed. Television, however, was not simply a new technological device. It was culturally constructed as a natural element in living room design, amounting to a spatial innovation reconfiguring the micro-geography of the home. The vocabulary of rebirth and renaissance used in the IKEA catalogue also underlined a clear and definite break with homes of the past. In the new Swedish home, television was, in the words of Cecelia Tichi, the ‘electronic hearth’ around which the family gathered. More than an added piece of technology, it created a new domestic environment. This chapter is inspired by a material perspective on communication and explores media devices or furniture—home objects that are designed for, or are in themselves, media technologies. It includes everything from bookcases, radio or television cabinets and telephone tables to desks, computer or iPad stands, and mobile phone chargers. Empirically, the chapter investigates the original Swedish editions of the IKEA catalogue from 1951 over a period of seventy years to its final print edition in 2021. All catalogues have been analysed, examining both the visual and textual content as well as the relationship between image and text in the page layout. The aim is to chart the spaces populated by media in the IKEA home and how they changed over this seventy-year period. What are the media life cycles in the choreography of the IKEA home? In what way did media matter?

In the 1959 edition of its furniture catalogue, the Swedish design company IKEA praised the new medium of television. Television promised to work wonders for the home and its owners. Just three years after the launch of official broadcasts and one year after its commercial breakthrough spurred by Sweden’s hosting of the 1958 FIFA World Cup, television ownership skyrocketed. Television, however, was not simply a new technological device. It was culturally constructed as a natural element in living room design, amounting to a spatial innovation reconfiguring the micro-geography of the home. The vocabulary of rebirth and renaissance used in the IKEA catalogue also underlined a clear and definite break with homes of the past. In the new Swedish home, television was, in the words of Cecelia Tichi, the ‘electronic hearth’ around which the family gathered. More than an added piece of technology, it created a new domestic environment. This chapter is inspired by a material perspective on communication and explores media devices or furniture—home objects that are designed for, or are in themselves, media technologies. It includes everything from bookcases, radio or television cabinets and telephone tables to desks, computer or iPad stands, and mobile phone chargers. Empirically, the chapter investigates the original Swedish editions of the IKEA catalogue from 1951 over a period of seventy years to its final print edition in 2021. All catalogues have been analysed, examining both the visual and textual content as well as the relationship between image and text in the page layout. The aim is to chart the spaces populated by media in the IKEA home and how they changed over this seventy-year period. What are the media life cycles in the choreography of the IKEA home? In what way did media matter?

On October 2, 1990, the ominous message above marked the end of a radio station with a global reach. For the very last time, Radio Berlin International ’s (RBI) tuning signal—the first eight notes of the GDR national anthem , “Auferstanden aus Ruinen”—sounded on the airwaves. This occurred in the context of the fundamental remapping of the European continent that took place between 1989 and 1991. The city of Berlin was at the heart of these changes, with the wall that separated Germans symbolically and physically torn down on November 9, 1989, making it possible for East and West Berliners to meet for the first time in decades. Although it was a moment of peaceful revolution, the autumn of 1989 was also a turbulent time for the GDR, not least for the country’s governing Communist Party, the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED). Other aspects of East German society, among them the media, also found themselves in between scripts. How were the new realities to be described, depicted, and made sense of in public life? The aim of this chapter is not to once again tell the story of the political 1989 but to approach the peaceful revolution and Europe’s remapping from the perspective of international radio and its audiences. It focuses on the East German broadcaster RBI and its Swedish-language broadcasts, relying on written manuscripts from the German Broadcasting Archive (Deutsche Rundfunkarchiv [DRA]) in Potsdam-Babelsberg. Through the manuscripts Radio Berlin International (RBI) and Its Swedish Audience in November 1989. This broadcast comes to you from Radio Berlin International— the voice of the disappearing German Democratic Republic. Radio Berlin International, October 2, 1990 140 Remapping Cold War Media of the broadcasts from August through December 1989, we can approach the turbulence of this moment from a new angle, revealing some of the predicaments that RBI hosts encountered when trying to combine the old script of socia