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.

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!

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.

Here and there – Satoko and Kok-Meng's office mixes inside and outside spaces.

Thanks for inviting us over! How did you end up in Shanghai?

Satoko Saeki: I first came to China in 2000 for an internship, as a result of studying architecture under the guidance of a Chinese professor in Pennsylvania. Having lived in Tokyo and New York, I immediately felt that China was different. I was not interested in its architectural scene but more the atmosphere. Instead of being established and “ready”, there was an air of dynamism and potential – something was about to happen.

Kok-Meng Tan: I came in the end of 2003 to work on a large conservation project in the former French Concession. Then I met Satoko in a café where we both used to hang out. She had started her own practice a little earlier and asked me to join her.

Which café was that?

SS: It was a small casual café called Le Petite, run by our Japanese friend Noriko. Since then, she has made the place more private and moved it to her home. She used to work as a designer for Muji and has lived in Shanghai for many years. I can call Noriko if you would like to visit her.

We would, thanks (see the interview with Noriko)! Could you tell us about your design approach?

KMT: We are not interested in the kind of design that is currently hyped all over. We rather believe in the genres of “under design” (design that falls below conventional contemporary design as deemed too simple or too banal) “super design” (design that exceeds the conventional because it may be too extreme, too personal or just useless) and “non-design” (functional and straightforward items and ideas that were developed before the advent of “design”).

SS: We are also interested in creating experiences and affecting behaviour in spaces instead of designing expressive buildings.

“We believe in the genres of under design, super design and non-design.”

What kinds of projects do you carry out?

SS: We mainly do interiors and small-scale architecture because, as foreigners, it’s difficult for us to get hold of bigger development projects.

KMT: Lately, we’ve been working on a small housing project for two families based on the ideas of sharing and interconnection.

SS: The project is called Minus K House. In Japan, homes are often described as 3LDK (3 x Living Dining Kitchen rooms) or 4LDK, etc. But for these two houses, the kitchen is shared, and therefore not fully a K. In practice, all the 19 rooms of 3 x 3 square metres also function as passages: to move around the building, you need to pass from one room to another, and there are many ways to experience the house. One of the families uses their part of the building as a weekend house and the other part is used as a regular home. The openness allows each family to be aware of the other.

KMT: In the Minus K House, we also wanted to mix inside and outside spaces – to make the whole concept of ‘inside and outside’ insignificant so that the relationships between this and that, and here and there would become more important. When this happens, the walls become less important, even unnoticed, emphasising a communality in the space.

KUU is working on interiors and small-scale architecture for sharing and interconnection.

We definitely feel that Chinese culture is more inclined to sharing than our own. Could you tell us more about your view on the concept of sharing in Chinese architecture?

SS: After the Communist Liberation in 1949, families typically had to share their bathrooms and kitchens with others. This was not very convenient but people got used to it. Nowadays, Chinese people are wealthier, but through urbanisation, like in most of the other big cities, people have to move to tower blocks which diminish communality. We wish to bring the concept of sharing back to Chinese architecture, but in a more comfortable way than before.

KMT: We think that sharing, or the presence and recognition of somebody else, makes people more in touch with reality. In our office, a partially roofless space built in the 1930s for residential use, we can smell the cooking of our neighbours, see their underwear drying, and hear them chatting. We really like the setting because it reminds us that we are working in a real context, mixing the inside and outside spaces together.

“We wish to bring the concept of sharing back to Chinese architecture, but in a more comfortable way than before.”

How do you find clients and collaborators?

KMT: In China, everything happens through the people you know. Satoko just visited a really nice indigo dyeing workshop outside Shanghai which we found through Noriko.

SS: It’s a workshop run by a 75-year-old couple who use natural indigo and cotton and dye everything by hand. In fact, China is a great place for a designer exactly because of this: the craftsmen and manufacturers are near and it’s possible to work with them closely.

KMT: Basically, you can just make a drawing and take it to the product-makers yourself. In Japan and Singapore, we usually use catalogues for picking up construction material for our projects while in China we can work in close collaboration with the makers themselves.

You’ve also taught at the Shenzhen University’s architecture department as guest studio masters.

KMT: Yes, last year, we carried out a design studio called Shenzhen Super Stir with our students who were encouraged to give modern architecture a proper stir through a series of exercises. We asked them to rethink the idea of “clarity” – a common architectural notion that has been inherited from the early European modernists. The idea was to ask if an estrangement from clarity or definition could inspire us to new thinking about privacy, communality and boundaries – and ultimately to new kind of architecture.

What did the students think about the stirring?

KMT: The students seemed resistant at first, they wanted to make new things. In China, traditionally, students are taught to create form – and if the project doesn’t involve creating new form then the results are not considered new. We wanted to make the students see the value in designing new experiences, too.

SS: We also wanted them to experiment how cities might become interesting and more functional through the “misuse” of space. In the end, the students came up with great ideas for an old industrial block where spaces with different functions, such as education or trade, overlapped encouraging sharing and interaction.

Like you’ve discussed in your writing, in the West, people are also obsessed with new forms.

KMT: Yes, according to François Jullien, a French Sinologist (The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting), this has to do with the foundations of Western, in other words Greek, thinking where something conceptual or abstract always has to be manifested as something else – a presence of “this” means the existence of “that”. In traditional non-Greek thinking, such as the Chinese, there is no obsession with presence. Whether something is present or not is never asked, because it’s not part of the question. Presence and non-presence, form and formlessness, good and bad, past and present, big and small, you and me, and here and there all exist in the same dynamic continuum. According to the non-Greek logic, we shouldn’t even ask questions about form or non-form – it’s not about one or the other but they come from the same pre-differentiated source.

“In traditional Chinese thinking, presence and non-presence, form and formlessness, good and bad, past and present, big and small, you and me, and here and there all exist in the same dynamic continuum.”

How do you see the current mindset of creative professionals in China?

KMT: When we first came to China, there was understandably no layers – no historical thinking or understanding behind architecture and design. The work and discussions were either stuck in Chinese traditions or random references picked from the Western world – and these ideas carried no meaning, they were not progressive. But then things started to change rapidly.

SS: In the last ten years, big money entered China and there was a lot of development, a lot of big projects. But at the same time, more subtle cultural things developed, too. Chinese people started opening cafés with unique local character. Before, people always referred to foreign examples, but the younger generation has gained confidence – they look at their own culture, society and roots and take ideas from them to the modern context.

KMT: I think that many Chinese creative people feel like they don’t need to live in the West anymore. They’re making meaningful things in their own context and recognising their own environment as authentic. This is great because, in the end, people want real things. The fact that people are starting to be their own selves in China is a good starting point for newness.

Kok-Meng and Satoko's office is a partially roofless space built in the 1930s for residential use.

We agree, and it is interesting to see how many contrasting ways of living and working seem to co-exist, for instance, in Shanghai. It’s not so settled yet.

SS: Yes, many people live in a modern way familiar from Western contexts while many neighbourhoods also hold on to the old spirit of sharing and porosity.

KMT: We’re attentive to the behaviour of people in Shanghai – how they behave in different environments, at different times and with different types of people. Things are in a fuzzy and seemingly contradictory state. For example, Shanghainese interact with their family, colleagues, and shopkeepers in a very natural way, but at the same time they formalise their homes into abstract symbols of social status and taste. Our young clients don’t cook, but they still want a designer kitchen. They will move out in three years time, yet they worry about radiation from the marble. We need to understand this phenomenon in order to work with it.

Could you name some other things that interest or inspire you about China at the moment?

SS: Well, we’re interested in traditional Chinese landscape painting: how the use of ink on paper, a single simple medium, can create a world of many things based on gradations of tonalities, densities, dryness and wetness, becoming present and fading away, hazy and distinct, here and there, this and that. In the paintings, we can sense an atmosphere of an all encompassing world before things became differentiated.

Noriko in her home and Le Petit Xiaoxiao café and shop.

Originally from Tokyo, Noriko, 42, has lived in Shanghai for 7 years. She first visited the city through her work for Muji, where she designed interior products and dealt with many Chinese manufacturers. “I have always been interested in production,” Noriko tells us. “The Shanghai area is special as there are many small factories here. I came to China because I wanted to learn the language and get to know the local producers and their thoughts.”

“I came to China because I wanted to learn the language and get to know the local producers and their thoughts.”

Noriko explains that she felt as if she was going back to her own roots when she moved from Japan to China. “Many cultural traditions in Japan actually come from here,” she notes. “I was also intrigued by the fact that Shanghai was so chaotic, so unfinished, and much more aggressive than Tokyo. You know, life easily gets shallow if everything is just beautiful. Here, it’s harder, but more interesting. However, Shanghai is starting to get more organised now, and people are getting more gentle. The city is developing, and maybe becoming less exciting than before, too.”

Noriko’s house is small and white. Built in 1948, it consists of two rooms – a bedroom and a living room where we sit drinking tea from cups hand-made by the host herself. The same cups are sold in Noriko’s home shop: a shelf of items from pottery to woodwork and textiles, most of which are designed by her and made by Chinese artisans – just like almost all the furniture in her house, too. Moreover, the shop selection includes some traditional Chinese everyday objects Noriko has found in random street shops around the city – beautiful and practical things that are often underestimated, and thus hard to find, in the globalising city.

Le Petit Xiaoxiao features ceramics crafted by Noriko and other products designed by her and made by local artisans.

“I’m very interested in primitive design and production methods,” Noriko explains her interest towards Chinese crafts. “In my own work, I try to combine traditional methods with new design.” One of her projects, factory-tshirt.net, sets out to create an online platform for designers and manufacturers to collaborate and learn about different design and production methods through the medium of a classic white t-shirt. On the website, Noriko presents her own T-shirt project involving indigo dying in a farmhouse in Zhoucheng, Yunnan and printing with plaster and soya in Tongxiang, Zhejiang. “It’s nice to know about things,” Noriko says.

The garden in front of Noriko's place is taken care of by her together with her neighbours.

In addition to more traditional crafts, Noriko is also interested in web design and programming. “I don’t like to distinguish between different fields of creative work – people are more complex than that,” she notes. Working at home and for herself, she also likes to experiment with the boundaries between labour and leisure. “I hate the office,” she says. “It’s the most uncreative place in the world.”

“I hate the office. It’s the most uncreative place in the world.”

Like us, many people found their way to Noriko’s through a friend’s recommendation. We heard about the place from Satoko and Kok-Meng, a Shanghai-based couple who met each other at Le Petit Xiaoxiao and later founded KUU design office together. “I wanted to create a small creative community by making my home a meeting place,” Noriko tells us about her activities resonating Chinese communality. “I have made many new friends at my place.”

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.

Marimekko lifestyle in Maritalo (Marihouse) by Aarno Ruusuvuori, 1966. Photo by the courtesy of the Museum of Finnish Architecture.

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 Armi Ratia and architect Aarno Ruusuvuori in the 1960s to accommodate all Marimekko personnel, to work as a laboratory of product development and to establish new ways of living. Even though this project was never realised in its full scale (housing for 3500 inhabitants, offices and a factory), the concept of Maritalo (Marihouse) was introduced in 1966 and Marimekko proved to be a lifestyle brand like no other. When asked why the cosmopolitan Ratia decided to base Marimekko in Finland out of all places, she stated that she was “not amused by easiness”.

When asked why Armi Ratia decided to base Marimekko in Finland out of all places, she stated that she was “not amused by easiness”.

Tuulikki Pietilä (Too-Ticky), Tove Jansson and Signe Hammarsten-Jansson on the island of Klovharu, 1958. Photo by Alf Lidman.

Another classic Finnish brand springing from a lifestyle, The Moomins, was created when the Second World War was still on. Finland’s most widely read author abroad Tove Jansson wrote and illustrated her first Moomin book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, in 1945. Having been depressed by the war, Jansson said that she had wanted to write something naive and innocent. The story about the eccentric and oddly-shaped characters living close to nature was inspired by the author’s close family members and a distinctive array of friends. The Moomins were bohemian, very tolerant towards diversity as well as on the verge of melancholy. Jansson’s original style and topics drew on Finnish mythology and spread around the world in many books and comic strips. In the meanwhile, she also worked on art projects like the Moomin House – a 2,5-meter-high five-storey miniature of the Moomin home built together with Jansson’s life partner Tuulikki Pietilä (Too-Ticky) and Pentti Eistola according to architect Reima Pietilä’s floor plan.

After the golden era, the design industry has shifted from industrial art to industrial design and later to new areas such as service design which are often driven by technology and require new sensibilities and insight. However, as we brought up in the discussion, important as it is to develop new, future-oriented approaches to design, in order to create brands that people will love, the bold and personal attitude of the 50s and 60s’ designers in Finland should not be forgotten. In fact, drawing on their spirit could help us regain the qualities of a design country and, again, to make new classics out of today’s resources.

Tattijakkara (Mushroom Stool) is designed by Company and made by Pirtakka, a company specialised in wooden furniture. Photo by the courtesy of Company.

An interesting contemporary design brand that respects Finnish traditions and skills yet renews them open-mindedly is Company‘s Salakauppa (Secret Shop). Created by Aamu Song and Johan Olin of Company, Salakauppa’s collection includes furniture and clothing made in co-operation with various small Finnish manufacturers. Tattijakkara (Mushroom Stool), for instance, updates the classic Finnish fly agaric stool to a new, non-poisonous, level. Song and Olin explain that the product range called Top Secrets of Finland was designed because of their interest in the secret luxuries of Finland – the objects people have in their summer cottages, the things they find functional, inspiring and of good quality yet so everyday that people forget to tell others about them. Recently, Company did a similar project in South Korea, Aamu’s home country.

Daniel Palillo working at his studio in Viiskulma, Helsinki. Photo by Paavo Lehtonen.

Another new brand that we feel has potential to turn design products into classics is fashion label Daniel Palillo. Carrying the name of its 29-year-old Finnish-Italian founder and designer, Daniel Palillo collections are renown for their juxtapositional and original approach to fashion design. In contrast to Company’s Top Secrets of Finland project, they carry little resemblance to traditional Finnish design language yet, and as we see it, show a great deal of attitude similar to that of the design minds of the golden era. Daniel Palillo dresses are worn by people ranging from grannies and teenage boys to American pop stars.

“One can never be entirely free, if one admires someone else too much.” – Snufkin in a Moomin story

Like the Top Secrets of Finland and Daniel Palillo’s collections, many of the most interesting design projects back in the 50s and 60s were not commissions but self-initiated collaborations. They originated primarily from artistic motives. In addition to suggesting a return to a more artistic design approach, we also brought up social innovation as a field Finns are famous for having known their way around before. Why not take inspiration from the maternity package for instance, a Finnish invention from the 1930s providing all new parents with necessities such as clothes, linen, nappies as well as a box to function as the first bed? Or why not productise the rarities of Finland such as the sensation of being cold or having to be aware of bears? It is important to consider what makes us different from others – especially in a curious, unusual way – and draw on that. We feel that many Finnish brands nowadays have a tendency to try and be international through looking at what other international brands do. However, as Snufkin, one of the Moomin characters said “one can never be entirely free, if one admires someone else too much”.

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!

TileToy is an open source project that applies the flexibility of digital software to physical led tiles for imaginative uses.

2. Semi-professional design practices

Semi-professional design activity can be seen as design on demand; people getting exactly what they want by designing it for themselves. It can also be seen as pure enjoyment brought to some through problem-solving processes or aesthetic challenges. Whichever, rather than helping companies, semi-professional designers primarily help themselves and learn from each other online.

Developing artifacts and artifact modifications, semi-professional designers are comparable to lead users, characterized by Eric von Hippel in Democratizing Innovation (2005) as people who are currently experiencing needs that will later be experienced by many. Operating in non-institutional contexts, they re-use, enrich and review predominant practices. From this viewpoint, semi-professional designers are also comparable to artists with courageous and hypersensitive qualities. Like artists, or scientists, they are looking for something that’s not there yet.

“Like artists, or scientists, semi-professional designers are looking for something that’s not there yet.”

A custom of endless reconstruction can be detected within semi-professional design practices, where nothing ever gets ready but keeps on developing over time in various different hands and minds. Semi-professional design ceases to exist when it turns into definitive products. Instead, it strives for prototypes; or fantasies materialised.

A certain aesthetic of incompleteness applies to semi-professional design. Tuomo Tammenpää also uses the expression ”clumsy aesthetics”, when talking about the design of DIY electronics and his TileToy project with Daniel Blackburn. “The clumsiness or the unfinished nature of artefacts underlines the act of crafting,” he points out. “Also, it refers to bringing forward the contents of devices, and thus opening them up for further examination and development.”

This is what Tammenpää and Blackburn’s TileToy project is essentially about: providing an open, versatile platform for people to develop imaginative means of use. TileToy brings the flexibility inherent in digital software to a set of physical led tiles that people can touch and play with. Both the source code and the hardware are available via open licences, allowing anyone to create their own applications and share them online.

In my classification of semi-professional design practices, TileToy falls into the category of open design. Promoting the ideals of free culture, open design builds on transparency and public collaboration – sharing ideas and know-how while receiving peer review and best practice techniques in return. The other four categories later to be explored in the Semi-professional design series are genotyping, personal fabrication, creative misuse and innovative repair.