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.

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.

Everyday life recipes. Photo by Paavo Lehtonen.

1. Food

I sat down with Apartamento magazine’s Omar Sosa, Marco Velardi and Leen Hilde Haesen to talk about their magazine and TASCA – Everyday life recipes cooking event at NOW IDeA gallery.

Apartamento is a bi-annual post-materialist interior magazine based in Barcelona and Milan. It shows people organising their daily environment with a focus on personal expression rather than top-down design, and old stuff rather than new stuff. “We don’t portray designers just because they’re designers, but only if they’re interesting – like anyone,” Omar explains. “Nowadays, people can make more and more things for themselves with the ever developing materials and tools.”

Founded only a couple of years ago, Apartamento is more than the magazine. Their plan is to make books, organise collaborations and curate exhibitions. In Tokyo, the team consisting of a designer, a photographer and a journalist was turned into chefs and waitresses, cooking and serving lunch for the NOW IDeA visitors during Tokyo Design Week and our exhibition. “We like to do things ourselves, something engaging for both us and our readers,” Marco says. “We like to hang out with people on a daily basis and organise things like TASCA. Here, people can actually taste and discuss what we have cooked instead of only reading it in the magazine’s cooking section.”

The TASCA event not only celebrated the release of the fourth issue, a Japanese edition of the magazine, but it also demonstrated the Apartamento lifestyle that sees beauty in everyday things. This lifestyle has earlier been explored through a London exhibition on the pottery collection of an “everyday life collector”, like Marco describes Richard Lamb, an unknown collector of pottery from garage and jumble sales for 15 years.

Just like The everyday life collector exhibition, TASCA brought people together around the art of mundane activities. Cooking food, sharing recipes and meeting people over for lunch must be the most everyday strategies of participation there are. Food sparks discussion, like we found out when taking part in TASCA with Kokoro & Moi to cook Finnish wild mushroom soup to puzzled Japanese. “You usually end up in interesting conversations as you have to sit down, not only going around with a drink in a party,” Leen says. “And, from the cook’s perspective…” Marco grins, wearing an apron “… people will remember you for what you do – for sharing your personality with them.”

“People will remember you for what you do – for sharing your personality with them.”

Tokyo hands. Photo by Teemu Suviala.

2. Aerogami

The Air Current/Past exhibition was to present the graphic works of Kokoro & Moi, my second home, from a new perspective. Depicting a journey instead of the destination and exploring the elements of variation, collaboration and play in the design agency’s projects over the past eight years, the exhibition took on a participatory format. It featured an aerogami workshop by Takuo Toda, the head of the Japan Origami Airplane Association and the holder of the world record for the longest paper plane flight, 27.9 seconds.

We ended up gathering at the NOW IDeA gallery with a group of aerogami apprentices and a stack of A4 prints that presented a retrospective take on Kokoro & Moi’s work. Led by Mr. Toda, our sensei, we then set out to the nearby Farmer’s market for the outdoor workshop.

Changing his grey suit to the Origami Airplane Association’s blue vest, Toda looked professional as he is. He explained his plans to go transatmospheric, flying a paper plane to earth from outer space (an idea actually being tested with the Japanese space agency JAXA) and demonstrated the making of his signature planes. After folding their own aerogamies out of Kokoro & Moi prints, the workshop participants could fly them at the market, jointly producing an exhibition in the air.

An exhibition in the air. Photo by Teemu Suviala.

Like TASCA, the paper airplane workshop was an experiment in participation. Only this time, the strategy was in the making, or learning by doing with expert instructions. Be it a free lunch or free know-how, both strategies of participation resulted in new situations and collaborations – post-materialist content for everyday life.

Coffee and meringues with John Thackara at Café Esplanad, Helsinki.

At OK Do, we have thought a lot about the role of design. What is your definition of design and its purpose?

I resist making definitions. Herbert Simon said: “Design is the first signal of human intention”. So, for me, it’s less important to define design than to figure out how we want the world to be – and how to achieve that.

You have said that design should look for questions rather than answers. Could you tell us more about your thoughts on this?

Designers have been trained to believe that their job is to produce artefacts – which can be a piece of print, a website or a product. The trouble is that these often have negative consequences for the biosphere. If you live in a culture that celebrates personal authorship and novelty, then you’re more or less committed to making new things. But that age is over.

How do you feel that the current ideas of a designer and design need to change in order to make the future good and sustainable?

Rather than thinking about the designer’s new role, it’s more important to engage in conversations with people who are actively looking for ways to organise daily life in more efficient and joyful ways. Working with those people will make your contribution as a designer meaningful. Introspection is boring. The pressure is for less, not more, stuff – of all kinds. We all need to avoid production rather than expand it.

It’s interesting to think what role education has in shaping designers’ goals. What kinds of emphases do you think are needed in design (and other) teaching?

I recently gave a talk in Helsinki to a group of people who are setting up Aalto University. I proposed that the university should stand for something more than “innovation” and “creativity” in abstract. I suggested that it should stand for an unconditional respect for life, and for the conditions that support life. It follows that design schools should be more open for interaction with the rest of the world. There’s a huge amount of design work to be done to achieve the intensive use of urban land, the redevelopment of brownfield sites and the use of wasted space – both public and private.

“A university should stand for an unconditional respect for life, and for the conditions that support life.”

As you have said, the transition to sustainability is no longer about messages, it’s about activity. Do you think we should communicate less?

The world is increasingly saturated with communication – so much so, that it becomes ever harder to make sense of what’s happening, or to make priorities. More importantly, communication impacts the biosphere. It’s not a choice between paper or digital because the life cycles of both print and digital media have positive and negative impacts. Both need to become more sustainable: http://www.sustainablecommunication.org/.

On your website, it reads that design schools should collaborate with grassroots and regional organisations, helping them to grow and develop. What is your message to the students who would rather travel to the other side of the world?

Doing things in the community you know best is more productive than traveling to the other side of the globe to “help poor people”. Locally you can get more deeply into the subject, and make a positive contribution to the community.

“Doing things in the community you know best is most productive.”

We feel like it’s an inherent quality in people (like us) to start their own thing. Then again, you encourage people not to start a new organisation but find a well-organised project with good local roots, and join that one. How would you encourage designers to hook up with others?

Setting up and running an organisation, even a small one, takes a huge amount of energy. My tip for you: find an issue that interests you and collaborate with people who are a source of positive energy. If the work begins to accumulate, then think about starting a more formal structure like a business. But do the projects first.

Our activities include organising seminars around topical design issues. What makes people attend your event, the Doors – how do you bring them together?

The most important thing is to pose a question that excites people, that seems meaningful. That question becomes a shared focus for a wide variety of people to join the conversation. We have stopped organizing Doors as a huge group of people sitting passively in a room listening to others talk. Our focus in recent years has been projects and events that become the occasion for a two-way exchange of ideas and experiences. This was the concept of City Eco Lab that we did in France last year, for example: it was all about real-life grassroots projects that included permaculture, mushrooms, spin-farming, open money, peak protein, alternative trade networks, dry toilets, sustainable urban drainage, alternate reality games, watershed planning, seed banks, de-motorisation and VeloWalas! In the event grassroot organisations collaborated with designers to improve their existing projects.

We’ve also heard you state that collaborative innovation is the way of the future – but it needs to be organised. Can you name examples of projects that have managed to do just this?

The Middlesbrough food growing project in Dott 07 is a good example of what I mean here. The idea was born out of my interest in food and cities. But it took David Barrie, our producer, to locate and talk to the town officials and a whole variety of citzens and persuade them to join the experiment.  The project was all about organizing people to grow food – a cultural intervention with a lot of help from a good city government, which enabled us to do bigger things.

Organising projects that involve people with different backgrounds can be challenging at times. How do you go on with communal design projects – what’s the design process like i.e. who initiates and how and what kind of methods can be used?

I don’t use a fixed method: I talk to people and ask what challenges they face in their project, and whether they would like some help from designers.  In my experience you can too easily fall in love with methods and stop talking to people!

“You can too easily fall in love with design methods and stop talking to people.”

Would you say that collaborative innovation builds on openness and what’s your view on the open sharing of design ideas in general? How and where should they be shared (online, “on site”, through the grapevine etc.)?

I never copyright anything myself. In my work as a newspaper journalist I quickly learned that yesterday’s story is old news and has little value, so journalists don’t worry about protecting their finished work. We go and look for the next good story. I think the same approach would liberate many designers. If you want to gain respect, put ideas out in the world. Some designers make money with authorship but it’s very dispiriting if that’s regarded as a norm. Openness is more fun.

Finally, we’d like to hear your views on the most important qualities a designer should possess?

Learn to ask good questions. Learn to listen well. Learn to look for real people who have ambition and positive energy. Learn how to coordinate mixed groups of people in co-design activities – or find someone else with that talent and make him or her your partner.  In summary, get out of the tent and get real!

See John’s further thoughts and recent work at www.doorsofperception.com.