Oivallus report 1: "New ideas originate in the boundaries of different fields. In the future, challenges will be solved in learning networks."

The goal of Oivallus is to make governmental decision-making in education policies meet the future needs of Finnish industries. What will working life be like in the 2020s? What kinds of knowledge and skills will the labor market and entrepreneurship require? The project seeks to explore and outline progressive operating and learning environments.

Oivallus report 1:

“If you are not in real time, you’re dead.” –Kevin Kelly

Waves of development, such as globalisation, climate change, the growing complexity and dynamics of systems, as well as changes in life values shape our operating environment – how we work, what companies do, what industries produce, and what sort of housing and urban conditions we live in.

The first Oivallus report asserts, for example, that in the future work will require more creativity and interdisciplinary thinking and doing, the motivation behind entrepreneurship will lie in a purposeful life instead of mere profit, the collaboration between different generations will become closer, and the public sector will increasingly develop services together with citizens and companies.

“You are what you share.” –Charles Leadbeater

In many areas, the future remains a mystery. However, one trend is clear: we will respond to the waves of development by networking with and learning from a range of experts and actors in different fields. These systems of interconnected people and organisations are known as learning networks.

“Anticipating the future is not about guessing, but about creating it.” –Oivallus

Oivallus report 1: Currently forest industry provides around one third of the net export revenues of Finland (The Finnish Forest Industries Federation, 2009). What will forest (www.upmforestlife.com) mean to Finland in the future?

Oivallus report 1: "What is Oivallus ('a sudden insight' in Finnish)?" – A project exploring the future of education in a networked economy.

Oivallus report 1: "A new target or method of use is as good an innovation as a completely new one." Experimental cooking mechanisms and mixes of ingredients make the cornerstone of the molecular kitchen at restaurant Luomo in Helsinki.

Oivallus report 2

While the first part of the Oivallus project looked at future operating and learning environments, the next one focuses on the competence needs of businesses.

“Future working life allows different ways for reaching the desired end results.” –Oivallus

The needed proficiencies will be different in the future because the ways of working are changing. Jobs are becoming less and less routine, and increasingly few of them can be done ‘by the book’. The future working life resembles film making: work is done on a project basis in collaboration with various contributors. There is also a tendency of tasks becoming more variable.

“All business will be ‘green’ business.” –Oivallus

In order to succeed, industries need to acquire environmental, technology, business and service competencies. It is also becoming increasingly important to focus on user experiences.

“The right conditions enable groups and their members to shine.” –Oivallus

Network skills and the ability to obtain, utilise and share knowledge lay the foundations of future work. At best, a learning network can use its extended knowledge-base to identify new opportunities and find solutions for contemporary challenges – the key is to work together with people of different backgrounds and capabilities. Learning from one another and building on existing ideas are skills that require practicing. These competences should be developed from early on and throughout education.

Oivallus report 2: "Skill synergies arise in groups. Future education will support working together."

Oivallus report 2: "What will we need to know or learn?"

The third and final stage of the Oivallus project will dig deeper into what kind of education will prepare people for work in the 2020s. The concluding report is to be published in May 2011.

Besides being a child’s work, play can be an adult’s way of life. It is a creative state of mind where one uses the ability to symbolise in order to create something unprecedented. The ability to play doesn’t only lead to artistic masterpieces, but also enhances one’s inner freedom by enabling a rich relationship with life.

A playful state of mind can be seen as a third reality between oneself and the outer world. When playing, one is neither in the real world nor experiencing their inner reality in the purest sense. You draw on the surrounding material environment, but make it yours by altering it for your own purposes.

Being both the third reality and an intermediate area of experience, play is also an illusion. It is simultaneously true and untrue. The play experience is like watching a Technicolor film, which also produces a mixture of realistic and unrealistic worlds – ecstatic disbelief combined with a wish that all you see could be true.

“Besides being a child’s work, play can be an adult’s way of life.”

Play can be escapism or a place to rest. It allows a break from reality that conflicts with inner wishes. In play, one can deal with complex things through an “as if” attitude.

Play is a potential space – it enhances a creative relationship to one’s surroundings. When playing, it becomes possible to free presentations from their referents and modify them, generating more flexible ways to see the world. For example, a child can use a wooden stick as a phone to call someone but also as a saw to cut imaginary trees.

The ability to use real-world objects in creating imaginary ones emerges during the first year of life. Later, the playful state of mind continues to prevail in artistic practices, cultural and religious acts, and in the attitude towards oneself and the others. At best, play is manifested in the freedom to be the potential you.

OK Do having BLESS candy tops for dinner.

The German title of the collection, ‘pleading for the present time’ says it: the BLESS state of mind is all about this very instant and the joy that comes along with being “present”. Celebrating the here and now, Désirée Heiss and Ines Kaag focused on food and different ways of having it in their Spring/Summer 2011 designs. The collection aimed to redefine the co-existence between nutrition and clothing, and proposed modifications to eating habits through, for example, new ways of sharing food among friends. It included not only edible garments, or jewellery that could be used as tableware, but also S/M/L trousers that adapt to changes in the body, being able to grow or shrink according to fluctuations in one’s size.

The presentation took place in an old church turned into a home in the heart of Bastille. In the manner of an installation, the models – friends of BLESS – were placed in different, open rooms and given various tasks to perform around food and drinks: some served champagne from a pyramid built as a piece of architecture in corner of the hall, others compiled Bloody Marys in the kitchen or took popcorn baths in the bathroom, while we were placed in the teenagers’ room with Japanese shoe designer Masahiro Kikutani and asked to wear gummy lace and liquorice tops which we were to eat during the show. Style-free and gender-free, as characteristic to the label, we wore classic multicoloured BLESS pieces underneath the candy topping.

Champagne wall and jewelled food.

From our point of view, the evening was a sweet and sticky human experiment. Having been confined to our room during the presentation – and given the instructions “just to entertain ourselves” while there – we projected our inner teen spirits onto the situation and tried to make the best out of what the environment had to offer by not only eating the garments but also talking, taking naps on the bed or playing Kraftwerk LPs on a record player found in the corner. Unaware of what was happening in the other rooms and somewhat at sea in front of the photographers who came to capture the event, we felt conscious about our activities and the fact of being observed. Our modelling took spontaneous turns from playing out the fashion fantasy to attempts of ignoring what was going on outside our room. In the end, it seems that the figment took over.

Popcorn bath.

- Better Dreams book project by Martti Kalliala, Jenna and Tuomas Toivonen
- Anni’s Master’s thesis about OK Do
- OK Talk book: design dialogues between Helsinki and London
- Science Poems London
- Supporting the champions in Punavuori, Helsinki through events with Kokoro & Moi
- A Stockholm event with Bygg
- Mr. Children
- Thinking about what OK Do will be in 2011

An overview of OK Talk and HEL YES! pop-up restaurant.

Making Places

The first event brought together six creative practitioners – Åbäke, design practice; Nene Tsuboi, designer and artist; Sarah Ichioka, director of Architecture Foundation; Teemu Suviala, co-founder of Kokoro & Moi; Tuomas Toivonen, musician and co-founder of NOW for Architecture and Urbanism and Finn Williams, urban planner and founder of Common Office – as well as an audience of fifty people.

Using different disciplines and projects, as well as the cities of London and Helsinki, as starting points, the discussion focused on the creation, evolution and essence of places. The panelists, having experience in making places through graphic identities, public saunas, events or urban planning, talked about utopian ideas and practical solutions, participatory spatial practices as well as the role and significance of localism and globalism, or planning and spontaneity, in their activities.

The gathering was complemented by Antto Melasniemi’s mushroom brunch, and it also included the London launch of Tuomas Toivonen’s Urbanism in the House album that continued on a boat ride in the canal, and was celebrated by listening to the record in the Islington Tunnel.

Nene Tsuboi, Benjamin Reichen, Sarah Ichioka, Teemu Suviala, Tuomas Toivonen, Finn Williams and Jenna Sutela.

Anni Puolakka, Nene Tsuboi, Benjamin Reichen and Sarah Ichioka.

Tuomas Toivonen and Finn Williams.

Teemu Suviala, Sarah Ichioka and Nene Tsuboi.

Antto Melasniemi, the chef of HEL YES!, and breakfast.

Urbanism in the House by Tuomas Toivonen.

Strategies of Participation

On Thursday 23rd, five speakers – Céline Condorelli, architect and founder of Support Structures; Ulla-Maaria Engeström, founder of Thinglink; HyperMarketo, communication platform; Karen Mirza, artist and founder of no.w.here and Suvi Saloniemi, curator at Kunsthalle Helsinki – and a small audience came together for a discussion about Strategies of Participation. Using tools such as an off-schedule (inspired by Brutally Early Club) and a potluck breakfast to which all the OK Talk visitors brought their favourite ingredients, we aimed to create an intimate atmosphere for sharing thoughts about encounters, interactions and collaborations.

The discussion evolved around topics such as spatial, cultural, psychological and communicative support for participation, self-production, online markets and communities as well as the concept of ‘non-participation’. Looking at strategies of participation from the perspectives of art, interaction design as well as cultural production of events and exhibitions, we also talked about the meaning of institutions, alternative cultures and friends in participatory projects.

The potluck breakfast, coordinated and cooked together by Antto Melasniemi, ended up including everything from fried British portobellos to Finnish crispbread.

Céline Condorelli, Ulla-Maaria Engeström, Jerome Rigaud, Karen Mirza, Suvi Saloniemi, Anni Puolakka and Jenna Sutela.

Céline Condorelli and Ulla-Maaria Engeström.

Jerome Rigaud, Karen Mirza and Suvi Saloniemi.

A potluck breakfast.

Audience at the OK Talk on Strategies of Participation.

Borderlands

The third OK Talk London dealt with the borderlands between different disciplines and featured five speakers – Revital Cohen, designer; Martti Kalliala, architect and one half of Renaissance Man; Zak Kyes, graphic designer and founder of Z.A.K.; Max Lamb, designer and Aamu Song, designer and founder of Company – and a record-breaking audience of nearly one hundred people.

The discussion revolved around the blurring of boundaries between design, art and other fields with an emphasis on collaborative practices. It explored the role and characteristics of a designer in an increasingly interconnected world where the ambiguity of professional identity, often connected with varied locations, people and modes of practice, was, in many ways, seen as an asset. The panelists also looked at the idea of designers creating their own economies, the culturally varying ideas of the concept of design (in Chinese, the word for design literally means ‘dream-shaping’) as well as the relationships between architecture and music, or design and science.

A salmon and potato breakfast was served by the HEL YES! restaurant.

Revital Cohen, Martti Kalliala, Zak Kyes, Max Lamb and Aamu Song.

Revital Cohen, Martti Kalliala and Zak Kyes.

Max Lamb and Aamu Song.

OK Talk London tabloid and a salmon and potato breakfast by HEL YES!.

Audience at the OK Talk on Borderlands.

OK Do thanks all the OK Talk participants, it was good!

The mind is a complicated place with all its parts, states and processes. I will never be able to get in touch with it in a way that I would become fully aware of all that is happening in me. There are and will be hidden parts in my mind. Something remains untouched and beyond the consciousness.

The unconscious mind has its roots in the body and bodily sensations. It is the most primitive and fundamental part of me where the urges of my body dictate the development. It is about keeping and feeling myself alive through constantly competing desires to create and destroy, to love and hate. Those were my very first experiences when I was little and did not master the words yet.

Nowadays, the closest I can get to my unconscious mind is when I’m dreaming. The dream world is a timeless place where anything I can and can’t imagine is possible. There is neither daytime logic nor any rules. Dreams are based on emotions. While dreaming, I have experienced the strongest and purest feelings: hatred, despair, horror, embarrassment, longing, and passion.

“Art touches the unconscious mind, because it connects with my archaic feelings.”

Art touches the unconscious mind, because it connects with my archaic feelings. Through art and its link to the unconscious it is possible to get a profound feeling of togetherness, an integrated sense of self. It is a magical feeling – like I had discovered something new and got connected to something old at the same time. There is a sense of alienation and familiarity side by side.

The unconscious mind hints about its existence to me. I can sense it in the instances of intuition and glimpses of gut feeling. In dreams and artistic achievements I can see pieces of my unconscious thoughts although they are in a masked form. I am connected to the unconscious when my body produces speechless, emotionally charged experiences and a free-floating sense of being alive.

My attitude towards the veiled part of me is ambiguous. It would be interesting to know more about what I am made of. At the same time, it is also scary to get in touch with the stranger in my mind. It is like diving into muddy water, not knowing what lies beneath. I have an urge to hold my breath and struggle to the shore, but going with the flow fascinates me more. That is why I will continue these gentle attempts to get in touch with different parts in me. For all I can say by now is: hello me, whoever you are!

Emilia Suviala is a psychologist specialised in developmental and educational psychology. She is interested in human attachment and psychoanalytic thinking.

Teemu Suviala is the creative director and co-founder of design consultancy Kokoro & Moi. He started his career drawing comics for Pahkasika magazine.

Sound garden

In Helsinki, courtyards are often reserved for household activities, like garbage disposal or carpet beating. Other than that, they are mostly used for passing through. There are sounds that big bins make when they open and close, and the clatter of steps when people walk home. But were the inner yards featuring more gardens, tables and chairs – places to meet and hang around in – there might be a hum of longer and shorter conversations, jingling of cutlery and plates, and sounds that gardening creates.

Avian melodies

Some clichés are true: birds’ singing makes most people happy. And if Finnish people love nature, why not bring more of it to the city? If Helsinki would have more trees and small parks everywhere, there would also be more rustle of leaves, and birdsongs of different kinds.

Concrete music

How to make the most out of asphalt, the dominant flooring material of the city? We would like to hear more click-clacking of high-heeled shoes, tapping of the canes of older people taking the streets, rattle of skateboards and, naturally, the sound of bicycles skidding and braking.

World mix

With Finnish and Swedish as the official languages, Helsinki is already a bilingual city and other languages, like Russian, are heard more often everyday. Bringing more ingredients to the mix and creating a babel of languages along with their accents, dialects, volumes, rhythms and intonations, would make Helsinki sound more interesting.

Johanna Laitanen: A Spectacle of Nature #02, 2005, C-Type Print.

As a kid, my favourite thing to do was to visit The Finnish Museum of Natural History in Helsinki with my big sister. And my favourite thing inside was a baby cow with two heads, four ears and four eyes. The Siamese twins, that were actually an oddity in a building for wild organisms, made me wonder: if they were boys or girls, what would their life have been like had they survived? What could they possibly think now, if anything? And above all, why did they have to stay in a box of glass? Were they still alive, I would have wanted to touch them.

I have a friend, Johanna Laitanen, who makes art about natural history museums. She photographs them to pose questions about how our culture observes, conceptualises and represents nature. My big sister bought a piece from Johanna last year, a photograph of, not the calves, but bears in a diorama of the same Helsinki museum. Looking at this “observation of the observation” of nature, as Johanna describes her work, makes me amused about the idea that living in a small town, surrounded by wild nature, as a child, the climax of my visit to the capital was to observe nature in glass displays.

Johanna Laitanen: A Spectacle of Nature #01, 2005, C-Type Print.

Johanna’s photography deals with the human desire to experience and examine nature through romanticised depictions. She explores how the scientific and taxonomic representations are, in fact, originally developed to meet mainly dramatic needs and aesthetic aspirations.  In the end, my awe of the museumised nature was not only based on the fact that you don’t meet a bear in the forest everyday, if ever, but also on the cultural ideas; the fiction it offered. “Today’s museum displays have roots in Wunderkammers [or cabinets of curiosities, collections of disparate objects, gathered by wealthy and at their height of popularity in the Renaissance] that were assembled with little or no care for scientific categorisation,” Johanna explains. “They were much more about story-telling through objects and about ideas related to pre-Darwinian spiritual natural history, where nature was understood in symbolic meanings.”

Scientists strive for objectivity, but is there such a thing? Johanna tells me about her artist friend who sculpts animal figures and whose biologist father is unable to understand this. “I think that they are both doing the same thing, trying to understand the relationship between humans and nature,” she says. “It’s sometimes forgotten that scientific presentations are never objective, but, as with any human creation, they always reflect the ideas and desires of their time.”

Johanna Laitanen: A Spectacle of Nature #03, 2005, C-Type Print.

A month ago, I visited a natural science shop, Deyrolle, in Paris. Carrying objects like old teaching apparatus as well as collections of preserved and mounted animals of all kinds, I was dazed by the simultaneous beauty and oddity of the shop. It would have been possible to buy a polar bear from Deyrolle. But looking at the gigantic, beaming creature on the shop floor with a hanging price tag, I felt scared. It made me miss the dioramas that present scientific objects, animals, as we often wish to see them: in a seemingly natural, yet magical setting, isolated by a glass pane.

Astronomy
Anna Ahonen and Katariina Lamberg – Higgs Boson, 2010, Digital print

Anna Ahonen & Katariina Lamberg: Higgs Boson (2010), digital print, 80x120cm

Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model in particle physics. Experimental detection of the Higgs boson would help to explain the origin of mass in the universe. It is currently searched using the particle accelerators of CERN but it has yet to be observed in the physical world. If the Higgs boson cannot be found to exist, the current cosmological and physical models must be radically reassessed – and our conception of reality will change.

“The idea is to give attention to a phenomenon we find fascinating, to convey its mysticism to others,” Anna Ahonen and Katariina Lamberg explain. “Natural sciences encompass many intriguing and beautiful things that usually remain within books and the dedicatees. We, however, didn’t want to make a scientific or theoretical representation of a scientific thing, but rather use the facts as a starting point for a work of imagination.”

Anna Ahonen (b. 1981) and Katariina Lamberg (b. 1977) form a multidisciplinary design studio Ahonen & Lamberg founded in Paris, 2006. They are also co-founders and art directors of the Dossier Journal.

Biology
Nene Tsuboi – Brain Drawings, 2010, Ink and pencil on paper

Nene Tsuboi: Synapse (2010), ink on paper, 40 x 30 cm

The altogether six brain drawings – Brain Forest, Miracle of Brain, Dopaminergic, Neuron, Synapse and Dopamine – explore the scientific aspect of human feelings, experiences and perceptions. They were inspired by the love stories of a Japanese writer Shungicu Uchida that Nene Tsuboi has been working with.

“I wasn’t so much into science at school, but when I read an essay written by a Japanese brain scientist Ken Mogi some years ago, I became a big fan of brains,” Nene Tsuboi says. “I like the way he crosses over the borders of art, science, philosophy and religion in his books, radio shows and blogs. What intrigues me the most about brains is that we don’t know that much about them yet,” Nene Tsuboi says. “Everybody has one but they still haven’t been totally understood by anybody.”

Nene Tsuboi (b. 1976) is a Japanese graphic designer and artist living in Helsinki since 1999. She started her work as an illustrator with ANTEEKSI design collective in 2001, and later founded NOW architecture and design office with architect Tuomas Toivonen.

Chemistry
Martti Kalliala – DNA Junk, 2010, Audio

Martti Kalliala: DNA Junk (2010), audio 33 min.

DNA Junk is a base pair sequence of non-genomic DNA translated into notes through MIDI and played by a Roland TB-303 bass synthesiser. DNA – the storage for genetic information in all living things – consists of adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine (A, T, G, and C) molecules. The sequences of these four bases, A, T, G, and C, determine how you differ from other living things. So, for instance, the raw data needed to construct a particular human being is a 3 billion character long sequence of these four letters. If this is translated into notes as such, it produces a near infinite monophonic melody with seemingly little variation.

“It’s been known since the early 1980s that the construction of DNA and musical composition bear similarities in their repetition processes,” Martti Kalliala explains. “However, I thought it would be interesting to bring the concept into my ‘home’ domain of techno/house/electronic dance music, and make something that’s actually meaningful in this context – not only conceptually but musically too.”

Martti Kalliala (b. 1980) is an independent architect and musician who is currently touring the world with his electronic music project Renaissance Man. Having worked amongst others with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture and NOW, he is also editing a publication on twelve pragmatic utopias for Finland.

Earth Sciences
Miska Knapek – Windtracing, 2009, Real time digital visualisation

Miska Knapek: Windtracing (2009), a real time visualisation on a computer screen

The animation draws the story of the wind’s movement, taking place in Helsinki over one year. It narrates the hidden life of the wind with a pencil-thin grey line moving in the same direction and with proportionally similar velocity as the current of air. The larger line on the screen shows a close-up revealing the wind’s more intimate movements.

“There’s a slight existentialist moment in the process of working with real-time data – even if you make rules for how the data is going to be shown, you never know what you’re going to get,” Miska Knapek says. “You could say that I got into meteorology through seeing what the wind data does: how temperamental the wind can be, how different seasons affect it, and so on. The stereotypical idea of the wind is that it either blows or it doesn’t, and that it’s this static, lifeless thing that goes in one direction at a time. But when I got the Windtracing running, I saw a movement that reminded me of a dancer. I had to sit down for an hour or so to only watch it go.”

Miska Knapek (b. 1975) is a Danish interaction designer and artist living and working in Helsinki. Growing up by the sea, wind has always been a part of his life. Miska’s spatio-temporal work opens new windows to the world.

Physics
K.I. Kinnunen – Faraday Suit, 2010, Clothing of copper silk plain weave, silk metal organza, boiled metal wool, carbon net, etc.

K.I. Kinnunen: Faraday Suit (2010), copper silk mix (vest) and ESD protective cotton with carbon fibre jersey mix (multi-purpose garment). Photo courtesy of Justus Järnefelt.

Faraday Suit is a series of clothing bridging technoromanticism and retreat. Exploring the invisible electromagnetic environment it resonates with everyday life through pieces functioning as interfaces between the built electrosphere and our internal world.

“The design for the series came about through exploring electromagnetism, electromagnetic spaces and wearables in those spaces,” K.I. Kinnunen describes. “I also looked into conducting materials like carbon and metal fibres as well as intact and layered surfaces. I like to call the end result a wearable tale, or functional fiction in the spirit of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby’s thinking (see OK Do’s interview with Dunne & Raby). This is because Faraday Suit plays with the idea of functional fashion design by inventing new motives of use through creating, for example, natural spaces with association to insulation from the electromagnetic environment.”

K.I. Kinnunen (b. 1984) is a fashion designer based in Helsinki. Having graduated as Master of Arts from the School of Art and Design at the Aalto University early this summer, Kinnunen spent last spring working with Haider Ackermann in Antwerp. At the moment, she is designing mini-collections for her portfolio as well as made-by-order pieces for private clients.

Cross-disciplines
Kaarle Hurtig and Simo Vassinen – Welcome to Parasite, 2010, Photography and text

Kaarle Hurtig & Simo Vassinen: Welcome to Parasite (2010), photography and text

by sherabbi, Nov 20, 2009 12:00AM (5 member comments)
Actually, the symptoms have progressively worsened: diarrhea/IBS, sharp pains on my left side. Nausea, UTI/Bladder Infections – chronic; these do not respond well to antibiotics (I was in Emergency in Brasilia a few days later with IV antibiotics). Weight gain, insomnia, Acid Reflux, dizziness, Respiratory Problems/Infections, DX with asthma in 2003, then COPD in 2006. I have NEVER smoked.
–
[Our] modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travellers’ tales. (…) The perfumes of the tropics and the pristine freshness of human beings have been corrupted by a busyness with dubious implications, which mortifies our desires and dooms us to acquire only contaminated memories. (C. Lévi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques)
–
Welcome to Parasite investigates parasitology through anthropology and a metaphor of a paradise lost. “People travel across the seas in search of themselves, for realness and for belonging,” Kaarle Hurtig and Simo Vassinen say. “Every now and then, a parasite follows us home. There’s a microscopic worm that eats our insides, reminding us of false dreams and vanity, and leaving an emptiness that’s hard to shake off. But we would still rather stay inquisitive than stop. Claude Lévi-Strauss talked about the “sadness of the tropics” and the disenchanting side of exploration. Thor Heyerdahl’s eagerness was naive at times, and Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti was romanticised and corrupt. Our work is about this battle of curiousity, amazement and melancholy.”

Science Poems artists: Anna Ahonen & Katariina Lamberg (portrait by Spela Kasal), Nene Tsuboi (portrait by Hertta Kiiski), Martti Kalliala (portrait by Paavo Lehtonen), K.I.Kinnunen, Miska Knapek and Simo Vassinen & Kaarle Hurtig (portraits by H. Kiiski).

The full length interviews with the artists are included in the Science Poems book along with various other poetic writings and images about science by OK Do and friends. The book, designed by Åh, is available online at Napa Bookshop as well as at the 0fr bookshop, La Librairie du Palais de Tokyo, Librairie Flammarion at the Centre Pompidou and Yvon Lambert in Paris; AA Bookshop, Koenig Books at the Serpentine Gallery, Artwords Bookshop Hackney and b store in London; Kiasma (Mannerheiminaukio 2) and Napa Gallery (Eerikinkatu 18) in Helsinki; do you read me?! (Auguststrasse 28), Pro qm (Almstadtstrasse 48-50) and Motto (Skalitzer Str. 68) in Berlin as well as NEW ACCIDENT (233-1 Jyouhoku) in Komatsu, Ishikawa.

Portrait of Paola Antonelli.

How does curating design differ from curating art?

There are a lot of differences. My art colleagues tend to do more monographic shows that have a different approach than the thematic shows that I favour. The reason for the thematic focus might be that I have more to prove and explain. Design is currently not treated as an art in its own right and it has to fight for its own presence and relevance in culture. Another important difference is that art curators often have a lot of reverence for artists – what they say and do is considered almost a religion. Designers, on the other hand, are usually working for a client and used to being questioned and negotiated with. That makes the curating different.

Working at the intersection of design, art and science, we’d like to hear how you see the future relationship between the three.

At the time of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition we were not the first ones to make design and science meet but maybe the first ones to make a full-fledged show about it. The Royal College of Art and Wellcome Trust in London have been exploring the intersection for a long time and the interesting and beautiful thing about their approach is that nobody makes a distinction between art and design in this context. One of the things I learned when making Design and the Elastic Mind was that the disctinctions between design, art and science become insignificant when you try to come up with new ideas that haven’t been proven or that don’t have a functionality yet.

The role of art – as it is generally seen – is to question our beliefs and habits. When you want to do that with design you need to use the means of art, like many pieces in Design and the Elastic Mind did. However, at the same time, every single work in the show had a design intention and soul to it. It’s hard to say what’s the difference between art and design – and it certainly cannot be built on form. You rather have to go back to the intent of the artist or designer. An artist is free to choose whether to be responsible towards the society or not – where as designers, by definition, are always trying to make things better. Overall, I think that one of the main roles of MoMA and myself is to give people who are doing meaningful things a platform and a sense of validation.

“An artist is free to choose whether to be responsible towards the society or not – where as designers, by definition, are always trying to make things better.”

In our interview with Anthony Dunne, he said that art shouldn’t need to exist. His reason was that in an ideal, utopian world; everyday life would be so rich, meaningful and challenging that we wouldn’t need a separate category called art. “I kind of feel that art exists because design has failed,” he noted. What are your thoughts on this argument?

Haha, it’s a very extreme argument which I love and completely understand! It comes from the same militant spirit that I have here at MoMA – as representatives of design we have so much to prove. I’m very glad that Tony [Anthony Dunne] is taking this stance because we need to make more outrageous statements to make people think.

Like you write in Seed magazine, as the focus of design shifts from the production of finite goods to a practice of experimentation, ideas take precedence over products. How will this effect the role of designers?

I think this phenomenon expands the field of action for designers. Instead of being hired to manufacture products, designers might be hired to help the company think. I feel that Tony and Fiona [Dunne and Raby] are sometimes commissioned to be a thorn in the company’s side; to make them more aware of the consequences of their actions. I hope more designers will do that in the future, when people start understanding that design is not only about chairs and lamps. Designers can also work with politicians and policy-makers – many of them have the ability to be thinkers on a general level.

“I hope that more designers wiIl be hired by companies to be thorns in their sides; to make them think and be more responsible.”

We feel that the university didn’t exactly prepare us for what we’re doing now with OK Do. How do you think designers as general thinkers should be educated?

This is an interesting question because education is the most important moment for designers these days and the geography of design is completely defined by where the good design schools are and nothing else. Nowadays, many succesful design schools already lead a more holistic approach offering studies in subjects like anthropology, and sociology.

When I studied architecture in Politecnico di Milano I loved a course in technology by Professor Guido Nardi. On Tuesdays, he would talk with us about how steel, wood and other materials behave, but Fridays were dedicated to Jung, Heidegger and Adorno. In a way, there was a balance between cold and hot showers; between teachings in pure application of materials and pure abstraction of theory. I found this balance extremely important and would use the course as a model for schools today.

Nowadays, many design schools are actually focusing a lot on the theoretical side and there are so many academic design courses coming up, like design cricism, interaction design, transdisciplinary design, etc. This is great, but I also wonder if any of these students ever go to workshops and cut themselves while carving wood.

You have stated that design is a bridge between the abstraction of research and the tangible requirements of real life, and that designers stand between revolutions and everyday life. Could you mention examples of projects in which you feel design has functioned particularly well as a bridge?

There are many, of course. Designers can satisfy our human needs by making a technological innovation usable and exciting for us. The next exhibition I’m going to do at MoMA is about the communication between people and objects – it’s called Talk to Me. The first time I personally understood this concept was when I bought my first Macintosh. It was the first time I felt that I had a pet. And this is what designers really do: they make objects into something that is part of your life. In fact, nowadays one of the most important functions of objects is to enable people to access networks. That makes the interfaces of objects and the ways they interact even more important.

“Nowadays one of the most important functions of objects is to enable people to access networks.”

What kind of roles do functionality and aesthetics play in the process of translating scientific revolutions into approachable objects? What about in the end results?

Aesthetics is important as a means of communication but never by itself. There’s scientific research that says that handsome people get higher wages. It’s kind of unfair, but there is a role in our natural evolution played by beauty. On the other hand, we know very well that beauty is completely subjective and if you look at examples like Almodóvar’s movies or punk aesthetics, they might not be pretty in an obvious way, yet they are beautiful because of the personality inside.

Designers can help scientists master complexity and take advantage of new building blocks like nanotechnology for instance, but what about their ability to dream – do you think designers’ fantasies can and should get involved in scientific processes and, later, the reality?

Sometimes artists and designers and other creative professionals like science fiction writers or filmmakers inspire scientists big time and push them further, even if they don’t admit to it that much. I’m currently collaborating with a sci-fi director on a symposium about science fiction, architecture and design. We feel that almost everything that has been imagined by architects, designers and science-fiction writers in the past has actually been realised, and the question is: what could we imagine next?

What do you think is the designers’ role and responsibility in thinking about the (sometimes negative) consequences of scientific discoveries?

There’s a lot of morality in design. Sometimes moralism also, but often constructive criticism. Scientists are also very concerned with ethics and what their accomplishments are used for. I think that the more communication there is between designers and scientists, the more the ethical agendas will become a general practice that everybody takes on. Many scientists today are so different from the scientists we used to know in the past. They listen to music, they make mistakes and they think in terms of ethical responsibility.

“The more communication there is between designers and scientists, the more the ethical agendas will become a general practice that everybody takes on.”

The Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition was not concerned only with designers who have an interest in the latest scientific achievements, but also with scientists who are engaged in the act of design. Could you give us your favourite example of the latter kind of cases? And do you think it’s necessary to draw lines between professional designers and other people who practice design?

Certainly different people have different expertise and I would never put a designer in the lead of cancer research just as I wouldn’t let scientists design my mobile. It’s the communication between different fields and professionals that counts. One of my favourite works in the exhibition, ‘Colloidal Alphabet Soup’ was a new protein marker by two biologists from UCLA, Thomas Mason and Carlos Hernandez. Usually protein markers just feature different colours, but they also used the alphabet to mark the proteins in more detail. In the exhibition, they showed their work through a poster where an image of this colourful ‘alphabet soup’ was magnified. Next to their work, we exhibited a fictional piece, ‘Typosperma’ by designer Oded Ezer who had imagined that each spermatozoon of a man would have a letter attached to it with each ejaculation resulting in a new poem. The scientists were so happy to exhibit next to the designer, to not to be considered dull scientists but rather people who are creative too!

Science poems, literally speaking [haha]. So, you would say that design can produce culture, or experiences, around scientific discoveries?

Yes. A good example at Design and the Elastic Mind was a living coat called “Victimless Leather” by SymbioticA. It was made of living stem cells from mice and it had to be fed to be kept alive. It was constantly growing, finally to an extent at which I had to kill it by blocking the nutrient. I was so disturbed by having to do this and the act resulted in a big debate about killing the completely artificial yet living coat. This example demonstrates how art can take a stand in innovation and transform it into a project, it can really make you feel insecure about everything you thought we were steady and neutral about.

Victimless Leather - A Prototype of Stitch-less Jacket grown in a Technoscientific "Body", 2004. Image courtesy of the Tissue Culture & Art Project (Oron Catts & Ionat Zurr).

In our Science Poems exhibition, we have given designers and artists the brief to explore and interpret natural sciences. What do you think is the meaning and value of letting creative professionals interpret scientific questions, processes and results?

Do you have scientists checking out your work and making sure it’s exact?

The scientists will be more in the background, giving information and starting points, rather than actually getting involved in the art work which is based on interpretation and imagination.

What is important, I think, is to have scientists criticising the work in the end, to give their opinion about the direction the interpretation is taking. A beautiful example of an artist and a scientist collaborating this way is that of the artist Matthew Ritchie and physicist Paul Steinhard. I think it’s important to show people working together and not apart. But if the artists are free to do whatever they want, this should be explained clearly on the label.

To sum it up, could you name the 3 the most interesting or meaningful concepts or phenomena in which design/art and science meet?

1. Synthetic biology is important. The idea that you can make organisms out of composing bricks.
2. Nanotechnology – designers are paramount there.
3. Visualisation design – designers helping scientists to make sense of their data.