Great Blog

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.

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.

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?

“The most important thing is the wording of what we do, the creation of vocabulary”, described Kjetil Thorsen, one of the founders of the Norwegian architecture firm Snohetta their way of working to me when I interviewed him. The whole interview can be found in Helsinki Design Week Magazine that is just out. What stuck with me from the interview was the role of a common vocabulary in the work of these architects. They are best known for the library in Alexandria, Egypt and for winning the commission to design a museum at the WTC site in New York – and for working collaboratively. Their way of making collaborative designs is to start by talking until they share a vocabulary, and first after that start drawing. If the process is done right, what they come up with belongs to all of them and no one at the same time. Common words lead to common deeds.

There is an important lesson here, not only to designers but everyone involved with projects. So many go wrong because those involved don’t spend enough time developing a common language. People think they do but find out too late they did not.

Norwegians seem to be a nation of great communicators. Today I had the honor of interviewing Princes Märtha Louise of Norway at the shopping mall Sello in Leppävaara. She was absolutely wonderful and engaging before and audience of a few hundred children, adults and elderly that had gathered to see her. It is interesting that as good as she is, she seems to have great trouble explaining to the Norwegians what she actually does at her school. In Finland she could have told the crowd anything and they would have loved her.