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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.

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.