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Working somewhere in between art and science, you aim to generate discussion about the relationship between technology and people. How would you define the role and purpose of design? And how do you define critical design?
AD: The question of art and design is problematic. A lot of people want to see us as artists, but we definitely see ourselves as designers trying to push the discipline forward, asking questions about design and through it. In fact, we launched the term critical design ten years ago in order to describe our work. Sometimes people think it simply means criticism; that we are negative about everything, anti-consumerist and against design. Some people relate it to critical theory; to Frankfurt school and anti-capitalist thinking. We are definitely aware of it, but then again not in that category either. Critical design is about critical thinking – about not taking things at face value. It's about questioning things, and trying to understand what's behind them. In essence, our objective is to use design as a means for applying skepticism to society at large.
[caption id="attachment_1403" align="alignnone" width="549" caption="a/b – "a sort of a manifesto that positions what we do in relation to how most people understand design" – by Dunne&Raby. Typography: OK DO."]
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You have compared design to art, using film and literature as examples of genres that are critical yet create pleasure. What do you think design and art can learn from each other?
AD: I think that art shouldn't need to exist. In an ideal, utopian world, everyday life would be so rich, meaningful and challenging that we wouldn't need this separate category called art. I kind of feel that art exists because design has failed. Learning from artists, designers should become bolder, more imaginative and critical. I'm not sure if art needs to learn from design, though.
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In Design Noir (2001), you wrote that "beneath the glossy surface of official design lurks a dark and strange world driven by real human needs". Do you feel that contemporary products do not match people's needs – and has this improved since you wrote Design Noir? Do you think that people are reacting to that themselves and how should they be involved in design processes?
AD: I think the internet has expanded the range of possibilities for pleasure and for fulfilling one's personal desires and fantasies, no matter how strange you are. But this still doesn't apply to products, which remain essentially functional. However, the background or the infrastructure of products has definitely transformed. Before, if you were obsessed about something unusual – like I was about strange radio cultures – it was hard to find any information about it.
AD & FR: Involving people in design processes relates to the do-it-yourself culture which we are not so interested in. Everyone can start making and modifying things themselves, but we believe it's important to have experts who can do special and beautiful things that are beyond the abilities of non-professionals.
AD: I get annoyed when people think that the DIY culture has made professionals useless. However, there are a lot of independent – yet professional – designers out there who offer radical products they create on their own.
FR: They are like activists; bottom-up designers. We like the story of activism, that there is room for free inventors. A good example is designer 
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Thinking that Finland hasn't really been the design country worth its reputation after the golden era of the 1950s and '60s, we started by discussing what made Finnish design interesting back then. Having to make the most out of the little that Finland had after the Second World War, design was blended into production, and a forward-looking spirit of collaboration between different disciplines generated intrepid, even utopian, ideas.
Marikylä ('Mari' village in Finnish) was a village designed together by the founder of Marimekko 
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Another classic Finnish brand springing from a lifestyle, 
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An interesting contemporary design brand that respects Finnish traditions and skills yet renews them open-mindedly is 
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Another new brand that we feel has potential to turn design products into classics is fashion label 
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The book also contains many musical and sonic references – sentences like “They were busy looking at each other with clicking metal eyes.” or stories about a band called Sonic Flower Groove after an album by the Scottish group Primal Scream. Would you say that you experience places through their sonic environment?
Being a musician I obviously have to pay a lot of attention to that. One reason behind the Sonic Flower Groove episode is that the first time I discovered Berlin was when I came here on tour with Primal Scream in 1987. So I was thinking what if it was reversed, that I was actually coming from Berlin and experiencing Scotland in the same way. And I guess that happened with many places, I discovered them as a musician. Music was a way to get my travel expenses paid.
How would you describe Berlin, your current home city by these attributes?
Berlin is a very quiet town. It has made me lose interest in pop music. The main sound on the streets is the birds singing. Germans like to see their cities as extensions of the forest and there are trees everywhere. And that’s very different from e.g. London where there is a lot of pollution and most of the sounds come from traffic or small speakers in every corner in every sandwich bar… And time is money. In that sense, Berlin is much less capitalist, much less toxic. And you can hear it. It’s a very avant-garde, experimental city. Even when you go to concerts you often end up listening to field recordings or the sound of a contact microphone being scraped up and down, sounds of ping pong balls or balloons. All this could be seen as utterly pretentious in many other cities but here you don’t have to have an aim or a commercial purpose in what you do. One can escape all sorts of obligations and necessities. That’s probably one reason why I have stayed here for so long.
Scotland number one hundred and three reads: “A computer makes a Scotland seem almost unnecessary.” Could this thought be applied to all distant places with internet access – like Finland, my home country, which you even refer to in the book (Scotland 136) – or is it rather a comment on a lack of identity?
Well, I think we’re seeing a crisis in national identity. I was quoted in a magazine saying that my true motherland is the internet. I feel like wherever I travel I’m always in this country called the internet. Or maybe it’s the operating system that counts – and I do almost feel a certain patriotism towards Apple computers. However, there’s another part of my identity that’s very Scottish. Whatever that is.
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You have lived in major cities around the world. What makes you move, and what made you leave Scotland in the first place?
It’s just a pattern I established very early because of moving with my father’s work when I was a child. After studying in Scotland I left for London to make it in music – a thing that all the Scottish musicians do. London felt like a bigger version of Scotland where more things were possible. Since then, my whole life has been motivated by appetite for certain things in certain cities. I’ve been lucky not having to work and being free to go wherever, even if it has made me very poor sometimes. Tokyo is my favourite city in the whole world. If my books are successful, that’s exactly where I’m going to go next.
How does the change of living environment affect your work?
When I was in Japan I felt quite isolated because I was a foreigner and I couldn’t speak too much Japanese. I found that my Scottish identity was becoming more important there. The album I made in Tokyo even has these rather strange Scottish songs on it. Berlin has brought up the need to experiment with sound because that’s just what people do here. I can spend my mornings at home writing something and the rest of the day is free for discovering something new. Then again London was a very commercial city so I tried to be successful and make lots of money. Living and working abroad makes you realize how only half of your personality is your own to control and the rest is really open to influence. I mean, we’re all chameleons in some way and the environment does change you. There’s a dialectical process going on between the environment and your personality.
A year has passed since the idea of OK Do came into being. Defying what John Thackara told us about acting instead of thinking too much about one’s role, we feel it’s time to reflect what OK Do is and what we want it to become. However, we are convinced that experimentation is the right way to find out the true spirit of OK Do. The following issues haunt us at the moment.
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!