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While the official documents for the new Aalto University were being signed at a prestigious ceremony at the centre of Helsinki on Wednesday June 25th, another kind of groundwork for Finland’s future innovations was laid a few hundred meters away at Katajanokka’s Wanha Satama. A three day seminar, organized by Sitra and Tapio Wirkkala Rut Bryk Foundation, that brought together almost a hundred design thinkers around the world came to an end.

A closed seminar, with very open working methods, was trying to tackle the new paradigm of design and what it means for education, industry, governments and of course the design profession. The new thinking stresses design as a method and a process that can be applied to a lot of things, instead of seeing it just as a way of giving a form to an object or a service. According to this new school of thought, design and designers can help to solve wicked (enormous) problems like health care, global warming or national competitiveness in addition to their old role. Design can be seen as working method that brings together a wide range of experts to tackle specific problems and challenges.

What the seminar accomplished is yet to be seen. We can for example expect a Helsinki Design Manifesto to stem from the work done during the Lab. What is clear and welcome is that the role and nature of design is being rethought, as Finland gets ready to apply it’s new national innovation strategies and to launch the Aalto school that will combine the existing tech, business and design universities in the Helsinki area.

The new paradigm – that design is everywhere and can be applied to just about anything – reminds me of the shift in the role of marketing a while back. For long marketing meant marketing communications, then all of a sudden everything that the customers needed and therefore a company should provide was called marketing. It made sense but was also a struggle for hegemony, the fun people from the marketing department wanted to invade the corner offices, or at least be invited in for a chat.

Now designers want to do the same, and not only designers, there are other powerful forces – like Sitra, some of our industry and some behind the Aalto school – that are pushing for design nation Finland to take its design more seriously. It is difficult to expect anything but good to come out of that.

It feels like 2008 will be a truly new year. New meaning different. So much ended in 2007 that a lot of new must be going on in 2008. The era of cheap money and cheap energy came to an end. The denial of the climate change came to an end. The era of George W. Bush started fading away. The the idea that there will be and era after Vladimir Putin faded away. In my change of the year column for the newspaper Aamulehti I listed seven things that will be different in 2008, or things that we will just see more of.

1. Quality. In the financial markets a phenomenon called flight to quality exists. During uncertainty investors want assets they understand and trust. Expanding on that we could think that, as energy and money get more expensive, the focus of global capitalism will start shifting from quantity to quality, from the cheapest to the best, from unnecessary crap to what is useful and solid.

2. Local. Rising energy costs and increasing carbon emissions will force us to rethink the travel and transport. Local will become trendy again.

3. Real. Whether it is luxury items, food or family time, things that are real, authentic, traceable, preferably man made or even self-made are making a comeback. In Finland this trend is partly enforced by parents worrying about the consequences of their children’s life on-line. Legos 1 - game consoles 0.

4. Small. The bigger the better. Outside of cell phones and some other electric devices this has been the mantra of the consumer society. Rising gasoline and electricity prices may well change that. Small will become chic, smart and affordable.

5. Teleconferencing. Big companies are cutting down on travel and installing expensive teleconferencing equipment. Individuals are finding iChat and Skype’s video calls.

6. Electronic ink. Amazon’s Kindle may have it’s flaws and be ugly but it is a step into an inevitable direction. In 2008 we will probably see many more paper newspapers die, but it is about time we saw an electronic newspaper emerge.

7. Nato. So far the Finnish public opinion has been against Nato membership. In the coming year there will be presidential elections both in Russia and in the US. Russia will probably get even more autocratic, while the US will hopefully move to a more democratic direction. This shift will probably make Nato look much more inviting to the Finns than it is today.

Happy New New Year!

The other night I went to see Cirque du Soleil’s show Delirium. Having admired the Canadian circus wizards on TV for years I was psyched to see them in Helsinki. Yes, the effects were amazing, the punk-glitz costumes fascinating, the make-up humorous, the props surreal and the music rocked and rolled. Now, there’s something missing here already… yes the acrobatics - they were also amazing, especially the unreal hula-hoop girl. It’s just that there was so little of that.
Walking out of the performance I felt both satisfaction and emptiness. Yes, I had finally seen them, and it was a good show, no doubt. But I had expected more - a more unique experience - more individual excellence, more moments of time standing still. When I listened to people around me exiting the arena I heard many of them muttering the same thing.
What we had experienced was modern brand management: spreading the good thing as thin as possible to rake in as much money as possible.
My Cirque du Soleil experience is still hovering in my mind as I’m now reading Dana Thomas’ Deluxe - How Luxury Lost its Lustre, a detailed and smart journalistic account of the contemporary luxury industry. In her book Thomas describes how in just twenty years the industry has diluted and inflated itself into the exact opposite of its promise. When everybody is carrying the same badly made handbag thinking that the logo on the fabric makes her special, it is consumerism, not luxury. And someone is laughing all the way to the stockholders’ annual meeting.
Luxury, as we know it, was born to serve the royal courts of Europe, and recently, through the mechanisms of global capitalism it has been “democratized” into something that everyone can and wants to buy into.
Or the so-called luxury brands have. Thomas ends her tour of the high-end fashion world with a few stops at providers of what she calls new luxury. And what is this new luxury? Well, it sounds very much like old luxury: it’s handcraftsmanship; it’s impeccable materials, its real commitment and care for your customers. It is the human element.
That’s what I missed watching Cirque du Soleil. What made them great was how they served old-school circus acts in a modern setting. But when the setting takes over and the moments of watching someone performing an amazing act of skill, daring and beauty are rare (optimized someone would say, because they are costly), the magic is lost. The magic is in the uniqueness of an incredible human performance.
Dana Thomas’ book predicts two things: there will be more of what we have seen so far, much more, and because of that, there will also be more of those who decide to put the personal back into business.