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Finnish Cultural Foundation is turning its eyes on built environment. For several years Pori Jazz Festival has been accompanied with SuomiAreena, a series of discussions on different aspects  of  contemporary Finland. This year the Cultural Foundation will organize  a discussion focusing on how housing in Finland will change due to global warming and other forces changing our society. Are sustainability, ambitious architecture and Finnish tastes compatible? I will be moderating a discussion on this on the 17th of July at 11.00 a.m at Pori Art Museum. Joining me are Olli Niemi from NCC Construction, professor Panu Kaila and mp Oras Tynkynen, who is also the government’s dedicated expert on climate change. It is a promising group of experts not afraid to say what they think. So, between Duffy on Thursday and Booker T. Jones on Friday evening, can you think of anything better to do?  Have coffee at The Pori Museum and listen to some house debate with heart and soul.

I was first introduced to new journalism, or narrative journalism, during my high school exchange year at Princeton Day School in New Jersey in 1981–82. Reading Tom Wolfe and Michael Herr as a history class assignment put me on a path that I’m still on.  Back then, as a 17-year old school boy I decided that real was cool. The better it was told, the more real it felt. Since then great writing has never meant an escape to me, it has always meant an  intense relationship with the reality.

Bonnier Publications, the publisher of Olivia and Divaani magazines, is organizing a seminar  on narrative journalism  called Storytelling 08 on Thursday November 6th. The seminar will feature two Pulizer Prize winning Americans, Thomas French and Jacqueline Banaszynski, and a few local fans of the genre, including me that I have the honor of giving the first presentation of the day. I’ve been given the title: What should we learn from American journalism?

I will be talking about the concepts of craft, journey and community, in American society and in American journalism. I think these concepts also capture the big questions of who you are, how to do your work, and what your job actually is. A narrative journalist  is a craftsman reporting on the journey of an individual or/and a community or a society. When you do this, when your stories  take your readers on journeys in the the world they belong to,  you are actually crafting  that world. This is an intense relationship with the reality.

I look forward, not only to a great and much needed seminar, but also to its impact on Finnish journalism. And, hopefully, reality.

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 was a fun and intense spring, mostly spent working on designing and crafting communication for design and craft. The biggest customer was Onoma Shop in Fiskars that after ten years of operation wanted to renew its strategy, layout, displays and communication and build a web shop. Great Point was responsible for the project and did it together with Lauri and Lotta from Eriksson & Company and Mari Vatanen. The project was financed by Uudenmaan TE-keskus and the Fiskars co-op.

If you are into ethical luxury, like things local, like stories, admire artists and craftsmen and have been to Fiskars, 90 km west of Helsinki, go again, and check out the all new Onoma Shop. If you just cannot make it this season, don’t worry, you can get into that Fiskars state of mind by visiting www.onoma.fi.

It was a turbulent week in Finnish book publishing. A week ago two of the most respected publishing professionals in the country left their long-time employer WSOY saying they were going to start their own house. The two men are brothers Touko and Aleksi Siltala, respectively the (now former) literary director and the non-fiction director of Finland’s biggest publishing house. A few big names from WSOY’s list, among them three former Finlandia Prize winners, have said that they would follow the brothers to their new venture. A few other big ones have already rushed to say that they will not.

Something similar happened on my watch at Tammi Publishers when some key employees left and founded Teos Publishers. In the quiet garden of publishing something like this is always a storm that rips and rearranges. The way I see it in retrospect is that literature needs big publishing to stay relevant, but it also needs small publishing to stay good. Big publishers keep books in the stores and in the media, but at times they forget to give passion and curiosity the role they need to guarantee the long-term vitality of the program.

“We are the good guys, but they are not the bad ones”, said an (American) independent publisher to me once when we were talking about big publishing. “They are boring – and that is even worse.”

The best guarantee against boredom is probably a healthy undergrowth of competent small publishers.

Another somewhat dramatic piece of book news was that Finland is not going to be the Guest of Honour country at he Frankfurt Book Fair in 2011. Well, if not in 2011, why not a few years later, I hear people saying. Sometimes setbacks are needed to sharpen your approach.

“A fundamentalist is a person who considers whether a fact is acceptable to their faith before they explore it”, says author and blogger Seth Godin in a great little video shot by Nic Askew. “…a curious person explores first and then considers whether they want to accept the ramifications.”

For anyone wondering about creativity and quality of work on personal, on organizational or on national level, the five minutes it takes to watch this video are well spent: “Curiosity”

At a seminar the other day the speaker mentioned that Google’s market share in Finland is one of its highest anywhere: roughly 90% of Finns use Google as their default search engine. The same day, as I got home, I experimented a little. I first googled (http://www.google.fi) my company Great Point, and it came up as number six on the search. But when I yahooed it (http://fi.search.yahoo.com), it came up as number one! Google 0 - Yahoo 1, since these are search engines customized for Finland, and here my Great Point is the only one. On the Finnish search engine www.fi it came up second. Former Ask Jeeves, now just Ask (http://www.ask.com) did not find it at all.

Then I googled my own name to find out how relevant the search engine thought Great Point is if someone is trying to learn things about Jaakko Tapaninen (it is by far the best source). After all sorts of references to all possible things related and not related to me, link to www.greatpoint. fi came up as number 92 on Google. Not very good. No one looks at anything that ranks 92. When punched my name into Yahoo!, www.greatpoint.fi came up as number 9! And what was just as interesting was that most of the stuff on the first page was far more fresh and relevant than the oddities that Google dug up. When I asked Ask.com, it did not find my Great Point at all, but all sorts references to English-Language sites where my name is mentioned. It was interesting though, since this was stuff I did not know existed. But how about the Finnish engine www.fi? When the first 50 references did not link my name with my company, I gave up.

So, the next time you want to know how you look in cyberspace, try yahooing yourself for a change. And if like what you find, hey, maybe you should use it for other stuff too.

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!

In my post a month ago about Snohetta, the Norwegian architect firm, I referred to their practice of always developing a particular vocabulary for a project before starting to draw. That popped back to my mind yesterday as I listened to Tom Kelley at the Idea 2007 seminar in Helsinki. Kelley is the general manager of IDEO, a Silicon Valley-based design firm, and the author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation. The ten faces in the name of the latter book refer to the different competencies that a successful design team must have.

In his presentation he named the three most important of the ten –The Anthropologist, The Experimenter and The Experience Architect – and concentrated on them. The most important of the three seemed to be The Anthropologist, the one who observes the people working with the device or in the circumstances that IDEO has been assigned to improve. “We always do the anthropology first, before we start designing”, he said

In the world so full of computer-based CRM, customer insight, customer-oriented this and that and questionnaires thicker than a phone book, physically going to where the challenge is and observing people in action sounds very fresh. And here observing does not mean sitting behind a one way mirror making fun of a focus group in a conference room, but actually going where the action is. According to Kelley, you can ask people, if all you want is to make minor improvements to what already exists, but if you want to find out what your customers actually need and you want to make innovations, then you have to go to them and observe. “Don’t ask them, watch them!” was his message. It is also the “secret” of the success of IDEO, one the world’s most famous design firms.

One immediately begins to wonder what would happen if one combined IDEO’s anthropology approach with Snohetta’s vocabulary approach?

Tonight I attended a mini-seminar that featured two prodigies of Finnish politics and finance, the director of The Bank of Finland Erkki Liikanen and the director of the financial group Sampo Björn Wahlroos. The think tank EVA had asked them to discus the US sub-prime crisis and its possible effects on the international and the Finnish economy. The discussion took place at the famous Mirror Room of Hotel Kämp.
Is the crisis over, or is it going to get worse, was what Satu Huber the moderator wanted to know. This is of course a question relevant, not only to director Liikanen whose bank is responsible for the monetary stability of Finland and to a multimillion euro investor like Mr. Wahlroos, but to anybody with any investments or any loans, that is practically everybody.
A fair summation of the very enjoyable discussion that took place would probably be to say that things might start getting better after Christmas but that things are more likely to get worse, Mr Wahlroos being the more pessimistic one of the two. Both agreed that sub-prime loans are more an indication of deeper problems than the cause for instability in the financial markets. In general, after a long period of overlooking risks, the risks are being reassessed and investors are fleeing from bad investments to quality ones and this is happening throughout the financial system. Those with money want to know exactly what they have gotten into. “Flight to quality” was the term that Mr. Wahlroos used several times. For Mr. Wahlroos the current quality asset is cash.
I cannot help thinking that the last time I heard people saying cash is king was during the stock market turmoil exactly twenty years ago. Yet, I walked out of the seminar feeling that this time around we have better bankers handling whatever is to come. Man, I hope I’m right.