OK Talk is a platform for bringing people together to discuss and develop the societal role and practices of the creative field. It combines different skills and approaches in events and publications with the aim to generate critical discourse, including asking relevant questions, raising insight and bringing forth tools for designers and artists to put to use.

OK Talk WDC discussion in June 2011 with Carson Chan, Kaarina Gould, Tommi Laitio and us. Photo courtesy of Bernhard Ludewig.

The OK Talk session at DMY opened up a discussion around alternative models of creative practice in Helsinki and Berlin, while reflecting on their value and support structures. The hour-long talk was accompanied by short presentations on different aspects to the topic by each of the participants.

Participants

Carson Chan, Architecture Writer and Curator / PROGRAM

Carson Chan presented PROGRAM, an initiative for art and architecture collaborations that tests the disciplinary boundaries of architecture through exhibitions, events and a residency programme in Mitte, Berlin and online.

Kaarina Gould, Programme Director / World Design Capital Helsinki 2012

Kaarina Gould presented Helsinki’s agenda for the World Design Capital 2012 project, which uses design to support cultural, social, and economic development in the city. The year of events under the theme ‘Open Helsinki’ aims to set a global standard, while serving as a meeting place for the world’s design community.

Tommi Laitio, Researcher / Demos Helsinki

Tommi Laitio presented his work on cultural politics and citizen participation with Demos Helsinki, a think tank for developing democracy to suit the needs and capabilities of the 21st century and the Dutch platform Premsela’s Republic of Design programme, striving to stimulate the development of design into an open cultural field.

Anni Puolakka & Jenna Sutela, Writers and Curators / OK Do

Anni Puolakka and Jenna Sutela presented a residency project that turns empty spaces in different cities into arenas of site-specific collaboration as well as temporary homes for OK Do, their peripatetic creative practice and online journal for bridging design, art and society.

Carson Chan, Kaarina Gould and Tommi Laitio. Photo courtesy of Bernhard Ludewig.

The event also saw the launch of ‘OK Talk Helsinki/London’, a book drawing from a series of earlier OK Talk discussions between twenty Finland- and UK-based designers, artists and theorists in autumn 2010. In addition to the best parts of the talks, the publication widens the discourse, offering new perspectives to design through essays, interviews and visual material. It is edited by OK Do and designed by Åh, including contributions by Åbäke, Bryan Boyer, Martti Kalliala, Zak Kyes, Markus Miessen, Karen Mirza, Anni Puolakka, Jenna Sutela, Teemu Suviala and Finn Williams.

The project has been supported by World Design Capital Helsinki 2012, The Finnish Institute in London and British Council Finland.

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.

Home-work-home

Jenna: Our creative practice is as mobile as it can get. Having homes around the world, we sleep and work at each other’s places and on the way. When we get together, we usually work intensively, turning our homes into camps, talking, writing and putting on events. And we always cook. Living and working like this, it’s easy to relate to Merce Cunningham when he talked about his friend and collaborator Robert Rauschenberg: “When I met Bob, I felt less and less need for conversation. I felt what he felt.”

Anni: OK Do and life also mix in the sense that we collaborate mostly with friends – or that most of the collaborators eventually become our friends. And then we cook for them, too. Perhaps we unconsciously try to persuade people to work with OK Do through good food… Harriet Beecher Stowe said that “home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve”. I think working on OK Do makes us happy because it allows us to be who we are and team up with people we admire and like.

“For the OK Talk brunches, we asked the guests to bring over a breakfast ingredient each so that we can cook together with them in the morning and sleep more during the night.”

Jenna: We usually take on slightly unrealistic cooking projects for our events, too – such as baking cakes in the middle of the night, in between a hundred other things. Learning from that, for the OK Talk brunch events in Helsinki and London, we asked the guests to bring over a breakfast ingredient each so that we can cook together with them in the morning and sleep more during the night.

Crossing disciplines

Anni: We’ve talked a lot about the concept of OK Do with each other and with others, in order to develop it further. And although we’re designers by background, we don’t want to get stuck in that world, or at least in the traditional ideas of design. The most important thing is to explore how we can contribute to creating better futures while thinking and doing things that fascinate us. We like art, science and music, engaging in dialogues as well as expressing ourselves.

Jenna: Having published our first book, Science Poems, in Paris in the summer, we recently also learned about the practicalities of independent publishing by running around the city, then Eurostar, and later the London underground with boxes of books. Not just writing, curating and cooking for the book party, we also took the role of a distributor in the project.

“One day we struggled with a text that looked at the poetics of quantum physics and the next we wondered how to get down the stairs in the metro with ninety books and a second-rate trolley.”

Anni: One day we struggled with a text that looked at the poetics of quantum physics and the next we wondered how to get down the stairs in the metro with ninety books and a second-rate trolley. We’re planning to issue a list of things that a small publisher needs to take into account when making a book. It was fun.

Jenna: And we met many interesting people – as well as some gentlemen who helped us to carry the boxes in the Paris metro.

Made in places

Anni: We’re interested in placemaking as well as how places shape us and OK Do. Travelling and seeing different things finally helps us see familiar things, like Finland, in a different way. While setting up an office in one place one day sounds attractive, it seems that, for now, we just need to keep moving.

“Travelling and seeing different things finally helps us see familiar things, like Finland, in a different way.”

Jenna: Sometimes, especially when travelling, it’s hard to distinguish between work and holiday. After Science Poems was published, I travelled on the Italian coast only to cook and swim for a week, and Anni took to Lapland. Living on an island with no internet, again, it was easy to turn food making into a project. This made me think about how not only cooking, but various kinds of mundane activities like changing or decorating one’s environment, or leaving it as it is, affect not only living but working, too. While in Italy, I read a story in 032c about the American artist Cy Twombly who made no distinction between interior decoration and art, but decorated with his paintings, just as he did with antiques. To him, a doorknob would present itself something as admirable as a painting – just as the contexts of Helsinki, Paris and London, an Italian summer house or camping in Lapland, play a significant role in whatever we do.

Anni: It was weird to have a phone discussion with Jenna about the name of the publication on young Finnish and Chinese architecture that was in process at the time, just after I had woken up from a night slept on the driver’s seat of the car. It had been too cold and windy to put up the tent in Nordkapp, the most Northern point of the continental Europe you can reach along a road. Deciding on the name, that ended up being Double Happy – (8+8=19) Views on Architecture in Finland and China, required a certain type of thinking for which I felt too far out in the periphery. I guess I had travelled there exactly for that.

“We collect bits and pieces from our environment and tie them together into an assemblage that is us.”

Jenna: Another thing I learned about Twombly was that living and working in Italy for a long time, he used white paint, his “marble”, to coat the sculptures or assemblages he made, as if to neutralise the heterogeneous effects of the diverse shapes and colours of objects they contained – making them Twombly. And I guess this is what we do, too, in our own way. Collect bits and pieces from our environment and tie them together into an entity that is us.

Anni: And then we take that entity into different places again. It will never be finished.

Originally published as part of Hirameki catalogue for a showcase of Finnish design in Japan, this article is also the third in a series of introspection on our activities as OK Do. For previous ideas, see Introspection is Boring – But what is OK Do? and How to Make a Design Think Tank.

To be honest with you, we aren’t experts in architecture, but really into it. Having been invited to collaborate with Newly Drawn, a group of young Finnish architects, we were taken by the opportunity to explore the topic from an outsider’s perspective, to interview interesting people in the field and dig deeper into our own surroundings as well as placemaking in China.

We started first by producing communications for Snowball architecture events organised as part of Finland’s cultural programme for the Shanghai World Expo, and ended up as editors of the Double Happy publication. Already in the beginning we came across the outlandish duplet: Finnish and Chinese architecture. “What could Finnish and Chinese architects learn from each other?”, we asked ourselves in the midst of trying to encourage Sino-Finnish architectural exchange.

Going to Shanghai in March 2010, we met with both Finnish and Chinese architects who told us about their projects and interests, providing answers to our questions. The discussions revolved around social and ecological issues and innovations, cultural differences and similarities, the potential for collaboration and increasingly crossing disciplines. The contrast between Finland, a small Nordic welfare state still dominated by a modernist stance on architecture, and China, a country undergoing rapid modernisation and thus pushing the boundaries of architectural design, proved to be big. While practitioners in Finland seem to long for a new air of dynamism and change similar to that of the post-war era, Chinese architects returning from their studies abroad are tackling the preservation and development of cultural identity in urbanising China.

For us, it felt natural to approach the topic of Finnish and Chinese architecture by investigating design processes rather than the end results. We set out to pinpoint areas that we found particularly important when it comes to improving life through architecture in Finland and China. Building inspiring and enjoyable cities with many layers and cultural variation as well as creating comfortable homes, work places and public spaces – and routes between them – are, in the end, objectives of architects in both countries. But while Finns know how to support privacy, the Chinese master communality. And while Chinese architects know how to tackle chaos and speed, their Finnish colleagues are experts in taking advantage of tranquility and empty space. These skills can be applied in both countries, even if the starting points and issues are completely different.

Double Happy includes stories that reflect some of the various facets of placemaking. Commissioned by Newly Drawn and head-edited by us, with writings and illustrations from a group of people invited to explore the topic, it draws a picture of Finnish and Chinese architectural environment today. Graphic design and art direction by Åh.

Contributors: Mathieu Borysevicz, Bryan Boyer, Christopher DeWolf, Che Fei 车飞, Pan Jian Feng 潘剑锋, Hanne Granberg, Hella Hernberg, Kaarle Hurtig, Martti Kalliala, Hertta Kiiski, Dylan Kwok, Katja Lindroos, Meri Louekari, Herman Mao, Song Min 宋敏, Bert de Muynck, Rami Niemi, Hans Park, Janne Teräsvirta, Tuomas Toivonen, Timo Tuomas, Valtteri Väkevä & Hu Yang 胡杨

囍 (‘double happy’) is a popular decorative design composed of two stylized characters 喜 (‘joy’ or ‘happiness’). There is a visual resemblance between 囍 and the two lucky digits ‘88’. In Chinese the word for number ‘eight’ (八) sounds similar to the word which means ‘prosper’ or ‘wealth’ (发).

The series of events consists of four brunch discussions, one in Helsinki and three in London, dealing with a total of three topics – Making Places, Strategies of Participation and Borderlands – exploring social, cultural and ethical viewpoints around different applications of design. Twenty designers and artists have been invited to attend the OK Talk sessions, each consisting of a panel discussion informed by a brief presentation of list-making and cross-question tasks given to the participants before the event and featured in a tabloid publication.
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Registration

R.S.V.P. at hello@ok-do.eu

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Programme

OK Talk Helsinki

Making Places

Saturday 4 September at ONNI home shop, Kulmakatu 5 A 4, Helsinki
Breakfast and discussion 11:30-13:30

Bryan Boyer, Architect and Design Lead / Sitra, www.helsinkidesignlab.org
Hanna Harris, Urban Researcher and Programme Director, Arts & Culture / The Finnish Institute in London, www.finnish-institute.org.uk
Amanda Levete, Architect / Amanda Levete Architects, www.amandalevetearchitects.com
Markus Miessen, Architect / Studio Miessen, www.studiomiessen.com – CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS – replaced by Shohei Shigematsu, Architect / OMA NY, http://oma.eu!
Nene Tsuboi, Artist and Designer / NOW for Architecture and Urbanism, www.nenetsuboi.com

Ticket: a breakfast ingredient specified in an e-mail following registration

Download the OK Talk Helsinki tabloid

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OK Talk London

Making Places

Saturday 18 September at HEL YES!, Wenlock Road 1-3, London
Breakfast and discussion 11:30-13:30

Åbäke, Design Practice, http://a.b.a.k.e.free.fr with Nene Tsuboi, Artist and Designer, www.nenetsuboi.com
Sarah Ichioka, Director / Architecture Foundation, www.architecturefoundation.org.uk
Teemu Suviala, Designer / Kokoro & Moi, www.kokoromoi.com
Tuomas Toivonen, Architect and Musician / NOW for Architecture and Urbanism, www.nowoffice.org
Finn Williams, Architect / Common Office,  www.commonoffice.co.uk

Free entry. HEL YES! restaurant open for breakfast orders.

The registration for the event ends on Thursday 16 Sept at 12am.

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Strategies of Participation

Thursday 23 September at HEL YES!, Wenlock Road 1-3, London
Breakfast and discussion 8:30-10:30

Celine Condorelli, Architect and Artist / Support Structure, www.celinecondorelli.eu
Ulla-Maaria Engeström, Design Researcher / Thinglink, http://ullamaaria.typepad.com
HyperMarketo, Design Practice, http://hypermarketo.com
Karen Mirza, Artist and Researcher / Mirza/Butler, http://mirza-butler.net
Suvi Saloniemi, Curator / Kunsthalle Helsinki, www.taidehalli.fi

With special breakfast by Antto Melasniemi, Restaurateur and Hospitality Entrepreneur, www.kuurna.fi.

Ticket: any breakfast ingredients worth around £8

The registration for the event ends on Tuesday 21 Sept at 12am.

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Borderlands

Saturday 25 September at HEL YES!, Wenlock Road 1-3, London
Breakfast and discussion 11:30-13:30

Revital Cohen, Designer, www.revitalcohen.com
Martti Kalliala, Architect and Musician / Renaissance Man, www.marttikalliala.com
Zak Kyes, Graphic Designer / Z.A.K. Studio, www.zak.to
Max Lamb, Designer, www.maxlamb.org
Aamu Song, Designer / Company, www.com-pa-ny.com

Free entry. HEL YES! restaurant open for breakfast orders.

The registration for the event ends on Thursday 23 Sept at 12am.

Download the OK Talk London tabloid

OK Talk Helsinki tabloids. Photo courtesy of Paavo Lehtonen.

Topics

Making Places

Making Places takes a fresh view on spatial practice. It studies both existing and imaginary places, looking at their creation, evolution and essence. The speakers for the two Making Places talks, one in Helsinki and another one in London, range from architects that build, design systems or make music to researchers and designers who create places through cultural activities or visual identities. Using Helsinki and London as starting points, we will encourage the discussion to revolve freely around placemaking in relation to day and night, the natural and the human-made, infrastructure and spirit of spaces, cities and citizens, or planning and spontaneity.

Strategies of Participation

Strategies of Participation explores the design of encounters, interactions and collaborations. Having used tools and methods such as intuition, friends, different media, travelling, coffee and the paper that you are holding in making OK Talk, we are keen on learning new ways to design participation. The panelists include creative professionals in the fields of interaction design and cultural production specialised in events, online platforms or exhibitions. They are invited to share their skills and insights on creating constructive collisions between people.

Borderlands

Borderlands explores the crossing of boundaries between design, art and other fields with an emphasis on collaborative practices. The idea of this talk is to look at the role of the designer in the increasingly interconnected world where we see the ambiguity of professional identity, often connected with varied locations, people and modes of practice, as an asset. What can working in between disciplines offer for creative professionals and the world at large? How are design processes changing? The speakers will tackle these questions through their backgrounds that vary from architecture and music to critical and experimental design, publishing and curating.

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

The MUJI paper chair. Photo courtesy of MUJI.

For the paper chair exhibition, we (and 49 other designers) were sent a chair and asked to make something special out of it by painting or modifying it in other ways. In the end, the custom chairs would be exhibited and finally donated to local kindergartens. We made ‘Rinne / 輪廻’ which is a study on the life of a paper chair that can be used as nutrition for growing plants after its original function as a piece of furniture to sit on. Our piece will be given to children in the form of a flower.

Rinne / 輪廻

Paper chairs have a life. When they’ve done their job, they can reincarnate as nutritious ash for plants. We made kindlings, and finally a small bonfire out of the paper chair. It kept us warm on a cold night in Berlin. Next, you can give the chair a new life by planting flower seeds to a mix of earth and the ash from the fire – rich in calcium and potassium, and thus vital to healthy and strong plant growth.

Photos by Jenna.

Thank you Elisabeth, Martti, Norman and Tesalia!

Photo courtesy of Hertta Kiiski.

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. Photo courtesy of Kaarle Hurtig.

After the workshop, we started taking the ideas forward, consulting experts and compiling our strategic design proposals into a set of concrete examples; some easily applicable and some crazier Clues to Open Helsinki. The team was also joined by illustrator Nene Tsuboi and graphic designer Anna Mikkola. In the end, we presented the ideas in the form of 17 + 1 postcards from the future.

Photos courtesy of Hertta Kiiski.

Here’s a couple of examples picked up from the set of postcards from Helsinki 2012:

A City of All Shapes and Sizes

In 2012, the city is built from the bottom up. There is more variation in the urban pattern: townhouses, bigger complexes, new and old buildings next to each other. Communal housing is becoming popular and people combine living and working under the same roof. A lotting system is introduced to distribute the urban spaces for different organisations.

Katu Mayors

In 2012, Katu (‘street’ in Finnish) Mayors live in the neighbourhood and are elected by their peers. They participate in city-level planning relevant to the area and ensure that the residents and local businesses are heard, breathing diversity into the city. These local trustees are supported by grants and permits which allow them to manage the environment, services and facilities.

Winter Holidays

In 2012, the unique seasonal circumstances of Helsinki are cherished through moving part of the holiday from summer to winter. Today, people stay in the city for most of the summer, making it more active, enjoyable as well as attractive for tourists. The value in cold and short Helsinki days will be discovered through encouraging interaction between people in the winter, too.

Urbane Industry

Few places have a craft legacy as strong as Finland. In 2012 the local talents have been saved from the brink of extinction through programmes to encourage and foster small scale industry in the heart of the city. Multicultural skills merge in the new collaborations between designers and manufacturers working closely together.

Finally, we organised a party on the occasion of the postcards from the future. Held at the Palm House of Kaisaniemi Botanic Garden, referenced in the set of clues as a living room in the city that could be used more actively, the event also featured super raw chocolate smoothies and music by the Katu Mayor of our choice Timo Kaukolampi.

Photos courtesy of Hertta Kiiski.

Please find more information as well as the rest of the clues at www.cluestoopenhelsinki.fi.

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.

Science Poems book. Photo courtesy of Paavo Lehtonen.

Science Poems book. Photo courtesy of Paavo Lehtonen.

Science Poems book. Photo courtesy of Paavo Lehtonen.

Science Poems book. Photo courtesy of Paavo Lehtonen.

Science Poems book. Photo courtesy of Paavo Lehtonen.

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.

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. 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.