Through a series of four ‘talks’ (one in Helsinki and three in London), OK Talk brings out different social, cultural and ethical viewpoints to design, aiming to create critical and intriguing dialogue between creative practitioners in the two countries. The events gather around twenty design thinkers to share their ideas on key questions for today’s designers. The participants approach the discussion topics through their interests, methods and backgrounds.

OK Talk consists of four breakfast events dealing with altogether three topics: Making Places, Strategies of Participation and Borderlands. The first event will take place in Helsinki on September 4 and the three events after that in London on September 18, 23 and 25. Before this, OK Talk kicks off with a tabloid publication, “a morning paper”, which not only introduces the speakers and the themes but also works as a conversation starter through a participatory narrative.

Curated by us, the OK Talk events are produced in collaboration with the Finnish Institute in London and Helsinki Design Week. They are funded by the Ministry of Education in Finland and the British Council. Art direction by Åh.

The Snowball project aimed to bring together Finnish and Chinese architecture through two events: one in Kiasma, Helsinki on February 12 and the other in Shanghai on March 25-27, 2010.

The events promoted Sino-Finnish architectural exchange. Tailored for Finnish architects wanting to collaborate with Chinese clients and colleagues, they presented an insight into contemporary opportunities, challenges and ambitions in China and provided the possibility for Finnish architects to present their work to local practitioners.

Snowball Shanghai programme booklet asks what can Finnish and Chinese architects learn from each other.

OK Do edited a programme leaflet for the Snowball Helsinki event as well as a booklet for Snowball Shanghai including articles about the purpose and background of the event as well as a short introduction to the Chinese and Finnish participants.

We also commissioned the design of the event material from Åh who left off with the idea of a snowball effect – a process that builds upon itself, forming a virtuous circle – apt for the series of events bringing together thinking and doing from two cultures. The blue ink snowball grows in size starting from an advertisement and a programme leaflet for Snowball Helsinki and reaching its peak in a programme booklet for Snowball Shanghai.

Following the traditional mindset of science fiction, OK Do’s Science Poems project explores the poetry and multi-sensorial aesthetics of science rather than its functionality and logic. This summer, on June 4–6, 2010, it brought together a group of designers and artists for an exhibition at 0fr gallery and bookstore. The weekend also saw the launch of the Science Poems book which explores the topic through images and texts by us and the people around us. The book and the exhibition are now travelling around the world – the latest Science Poems party took place in Helsinki on July 10 at Napa Gallery.

The Science Poems exhibition and book approach science from an artistic perspective, reflecting on psychological and philosophical thoughts without necessarily considering conventional constraints or scientific objectives. In our opinion, applying grids of interpretation, typical of the fields of art and design, to the field of science (and vice versa) can cast new light upon the content and lead to new insights. In the same vein, the exhibition and book aim to function as tools to see and understand or as tools to imagine and question.

Ranging from fashion exploring electromagnetic space to an audio piece derived from DNA base pairs, each piece in the Science Poems exhibition deals with a particular field of natural sciences: astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, physics or cross-disciplines. The participants are Anna Ahonen & Katariina Lamberg, graphic designers; Kaarle Hurtig & Simo Vassinen, photographer and writer; Martti Kalliala (Renaissance Man), sound artist; K.I. Kinnunen, fashion designer; Miska Knapek, media artist; and Nene Tsuboi, illustrator.

The book, designed by Åh, features discussions with Marc-Olivier Wahler of Palais de Tokyo as well as Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby from the Royal College of Art. It also includes articles about parallel universes, spiritual science or building an ecosystem at home, a talk with a philosopher, a science fiction short story as well as various other poetic writings and images about science by OK Do and friends.

The exhibition and book launched on June 4 in Paris, the home of Alphaville, a 1965 film by Jean-Luc Godard, which inspired us to start Science Poems in the first place. Paris is also the city of a recent artist residency and revisitation of the OK Do members.

Vernissage at 0fr on June 4, 2010.

Science Poems book at the 0fr bookshop.

Samples of the Science Poems book. Photo courtesy of Jaakko Pietiläinen.

Nathalie and Windtracing by Miska Knapek at the Science Poems exhibition at 0fr gallery.

People at the Science Poems exhibition at 0fr gallery.

Higgs Boson by Anna Ahonen and Katariina Lamberg at the Science Poems exhibition at 0fr gallery.

The book is available at the 0fr bookshop (20, rue Dupetit-Thouars), La Librairie du Palais de Tokyo (3, avenue du Président Wilson), Librairie Flammarion at the Centre Pompidou (place Georges Pompidou) and Yvon Lambert (108, rue Vieille-du-Temple) in Paris; AA Bookshop (36 Bedford Square), Koenig Books at the Serpentine Gallery (Kensington Gardens), Artwords Bookshop Hackney (20-22 Broadway Market) and b store (24a Savile Row) 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. Order it online via Napa Books.

The project started in May 2010 with a Saturday brunch discussion at Sitra. We invited around ten Helsinki-based people from different fields to imagine a more interesting and enjoyable city and ended up with a bunch of ideas.

Dreaming up life-improving initiatives for Helsinki.

Local delicacies by Maatilatori, a life-improving grocery shop in Helsinki.

At the moment, we are taking about twenty of the ideas forward, consulting experts and compiling them into a set of concrete examples; some easily applicable and some crazier Clues to Open Helsinki. More info on the project to follow.

Mr. Children project brings together children and professionals in the context of fashion. It explores the idea of children as head designers and adults as assistants and consumers.

Organised by fashion designer Daniel Palillo and us, the project will result in a clothing collection for adults as well as documentary material on the design process. It will involve 10 children aged around 5-8 and a crew of professional producers, design assistants, pattern and dressmakers, stylists and photographers. The idea is to encourage children and adults to collaborate and use their creative abilities in an ambitious project which is, at the same time, all about play!

The Mr. Children project will start with a design workshop for children designers and adult pattern makers during Helsinki Design Week in autumn. At this point, the children will collaborate with the pattern makers to make sketches of their clothing items based on a set of chosen textiles and basic patterns for shirts, dresses and leggings. After the workshop, the designs will be forwarded to the sewers and finally displayed in an exhibition and look book.

Better City by Biking, OK Do's first column for We Are Helsinki magazine.

The first OK Do column for We Are Helsinki features a meeting with Marek Salermo, a former cyclist in the Belgian racing team, as well as a bicycle traffic planner working for the City of Helsinki. So far we’ve also met up with artists and designers Daniel Palillo and Nene Tsuboi to talk about dressing up Helsinki and asked local restaurant owners of foreign origin how food can make a city. In addition to these articles, all our Helsinki stories appear on the OK Do site, too.

Dressing Up Helsinki, the second column for We Are Helsinki magazine.

Food Makes a City, the third column for We Are Helsinki magazine.

Happy New Year!

1. Going beyond design

We started OK Do to have a home for uncompromised and personal thinking, writing and doing. Designers by background, we are interested in applying our skills and methods to action that eludes traditional categories and disciplinary boundaries. We started as a ‘design think tank’ yet now we are tempted to move beyond the realm of design – to one that combines design, art and science as freely as possible. To experiment with this idea, we are now working on our Science Poems project which aims to bring the trinity together.

2. What’s on the menu, Mesdames?

Sometimes people find it difficult to understand what it is that we actually do. In short, we want to do creative projects both independently as well as through assignments. Challenging some dominant ideas about efficiency we don’t have a set menu for our offerings. At the moment, we aim to approach each project individually and with an experimental take, avoiding short-circuit thinking and doing. We also agree with Tuula Pöyhönen’s opinion that a client-assignee relationships shouldn’t be based on compromises but a common wavelength to begin with. In our view, best collaborations are based on trust and a shared interest in thought-provoking processes and results. If you like what we do, let’s collaborate!

3. Problem solving vs. problem finding

One of the eye-openers we had this year was the meeting with designers and Royal College of Art professors Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby which will be documented here early 2010. Their view to design is, in their own words, critical. This means, for example, that instead of problem solving, they focus on problem finding and asking questions that challenge the societal status quo. After buying this idea, it’s hard to go back to the old ways of a designer. We are currently in the middle of searching the OK Do way to be creatively critical and critically creative. Hello problems two thousand and ten, here we come!

Oivallus report I: "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 perceptions and needs of the Finnish industries. What will the working life be like in the 2020s? What kind of knowledge and skills will the labour market and entrepreneurs need? The project seeks to explore and outline future operating environments and learning networks.

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

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

The 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 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.

In addition to taking part in the project as thinkers representing the creative sector, OK Do designed the communications concept and the visual identity of the Oivallus interim reports – the first of which, published in November 2009, is presented here. The work was done in collaboration with graphic designer Jonatan Eriksson and photographer Kaarle Hurtig.

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

While the first part of the Oivallus project focused on the content of future education, the next part will explore how to teach and learn the required know-how. Oivallus is funded by EK, European Union and Finnish National Board of Education.

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?

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

"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.

Making of OK Do.

1. Get an idea

The idea of a design think tank sprang from our need to create a home for uncompromised thoughts, writing and doing. We wanted to create our own platform for collaboration and projects. The idea of OK Do was first discussed during a loud gig. We could hardly hear each other, but a couple of messy sentences were enough to deliver a common understanding. The idea of OK Do is great at least in a sense that it’s something that we believe in and really wanted to do.