The Finnish-Norwegian Cultural Foundation and the Innovation Norway organized the best design seminar of the decade. Rich with practical substance, ideas and enthusiasm it brought together a set of speakers that would deserve to be heard by broader audiences. It was a true pleasure to moderate the seminar and to hear about their thoughts. Here are some notes from each presentation, please feel free to complement and continue the discussion.
Ilkka Suppanen: What’s the real problem?
Ilkka is an honest man and admits he does not know what ecological design means. This does not tell about his ignorance, on the contrary, it means he thinks many questions further than an ordinary man. Ecological design is not a simple subject, and being an ecological designer is even less simple.
Let’s take an example: Ilkka travels in the Arabic countries and is fascinated about the beautiful, mathematical decoration patterns of the Islamic world. He comes back home and designs the Marhaba fabric for Marimekko (Marhaba meaning “Hello” in Arabic). After thinking it for a while he realizes Marimekko has a problem. It’s a potential image problem, which however, could be played out in a positive way. The problem is the cotton. Nobody really knows where it comes from, but everyone knows the amount of water to make cotton is significant. Most often cotton comes from the areas that lack clean drinking water. So we have sustainable Finnish Design on an ecologically suspicious canvas.
Ilkka also like fast cars and feels a bit guilty about it. He however hopes we will go with cars the same way we have gone with horses: driving and maintaining cars should be a pleasant leisure time hobby. Public transportation should move us during weekdays.
Kjersti Kviseth: There is no such place as “away”
Throwing things away is like throwing dirt on ourselves, the cleaning of which is costing us too much resources.
In addition to designers, we need “material flow managers” who’s job is to “take care of materials during their various lifecycles as different kinds of products”. A car uses 1,5 km of plastic wire, that is difficult to reuse, because it was never designed to be pulled out from the car again. That’s Kjersti’s point: everything should be designed for reuse and we should really take much better care of the materials we are using. The amount of waste produced for not recycling materials is insane. Instead of going from cradle to grave products should go from cradle to cradle.
We heard the Dutch government is already ahead of everyone else: they have declared to be the first cradle to cradle nation by 2012 and invested huge sums for better handling the circulation of waste materials. Investment in material recycling reduces the need for waste management in the future.
So, designers: focus on innovative use of materials. Exaples: Freitag bag company.
Katinka von der Lippe: Create new jobs and build a new infrastructure
Figure this out: there is a handful of smart Norwegians who decide to make an electric city car. They believe in this idea, fight for keeping it alive, talk about it, travel around to convince people --- for 18 years! And now it’s taking off, the Think car. It’s a cute, completely zero emission city car! They are now even bringing their production to Uusikaupunki that has free manufacturing capacity after Saab closed down their factory.
Katinka von der Lippe is a voice from the future. Calmly she drops out arguments why electric transportation can change things into better: 1) less pollution and respiratory problems in cities, 2) less dependency on oil, 3) less CO2 emissions from commercial transportation and logistics. Hard to disagree.
(We are so happy for you and wish the best success for Think!)Anne Stenroos: put small things together to make a big impact
Anne Stenroos has been a professor at the University of Technology. She has directed the Finnish Design Forum, and also lived in Singapore. From Asia anything smaller than Europe looks really small. And by 2030, she reminds, Europe will be an elderly house.
Like the previous speakers, neither Stenroos is interested to talk about the traditional product design. Instead, she says that sustainable design and innovation is increasingly going to be social innovation and urban environmental innovation, and that the essential question there is “how big an impact can it have.” Social innovations are essential, and we have not yet really started thinking about them.
Stenroos does not anymore believe in top down thinking. It’s not anymore about big corporations, big research programs, big anything. It’s about putting small things together that matter.
I asked Anne where the future design or product directors or anyone can learn this kind of approach. The unpleasant truth is: nowhere. Yet. Well, we know at least one school where this kind of teaching should happen, now that the department of architecture is under the same roof with the department of design and the school of business.Christian Lodgaard: Don’t tell you’re using recycable materials. Use already recycled materials.
Now every furniture company dares to ask themselves if the world needs another new piece of furniture. Neither does every furniture company keep a list on the wall of the materials that can reduce their ecological footprint. Christian Lodgaard and his company Håg do.
After big ideas it is good to hear something concrete, like what is the leading office seating company actually doing to be ecological. No, wait. That was a bad formulation: they are not doing things specifically for trying to be ecological. To do business in a sustainable way is their way of going. Cradle to cradle is part of their production strategy.
Taina Snellman: Design is a tool to help
Fashion designer Taina Snellman was traveling in rural India, where she saw great craftsmanship that was however “not up to date with our time”. “Perhaps I can use my skills and do something good”, Taina thought, and founded a company called Tikau (a hindi word for long lasting, sustainable). She handpicked individual weavers, families, and communities who most needed work, and called top designers (such as Klaus Haapaniemi) from the other side of the world to make beautiful designs for wool rugs and carpets.
New things come slowly. “First you have to feed the people, and then you can start discussing about developing something together.”
Oh yes, and the address for the Tikau shop in Helsinki is Lönnrotsgatan 39.
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