Ulla Engeström

TEDx Helsinki: Good night washing machine. Good bye trash.

(This is a short translation of my talk at the first TEDex conference in Helsinki, held in October 2009.)

When our son turned one we started reading him Margaret Wise Brown’s ”Good Night Moon”. The main character of the book is a modest-looking bunny. What happens then is that the bunny goes to sleep, and says ”good night” to all the things in the room, including the stars and the moon.

So our son turned two, and started talking. To our surprise, whenever we left the house or daycare, he took an extra minute to greet all the people ad objects nearby. So we heard: bye bye daddy! bye mirror! bye lamp! and bye bye washing machine!, etc.

This was of course so cute that I did not dare to correct him by telling that you actually don’t need to greet objects, just people.  I mean, it sounds a bit silly, doesn't it, and the washing machine doesn’t even say anything back, does it?

It only hit me some time ago that Margaret Wise Brown might have had an agenda, and that agenda is shaping our son's view of the world. In this view people and objects, the starts and the moon all seem to somehow float in the same category. They are all things that you show respect to, in this case, by greeting.

This of course differs from the way the rest of us sees the world and the things in it. We have already learned that the relationship between people, objects and nature is hierarchical. People come first, objects and nature that are harnessed to serve us, come second. So with no regrets we have learned to use our environment for whatever cause without having to give anything back. Everything is and must be available for a price, because otherwise life could not become perfect. If things don't work, it's ok, let’s replace, get a new one that works better, and throw the old away because life is short and we are so darn busy. We buy because we can and it’s cheap – even if it's just trash.

This is my topic: trash. We produce and consume too much of it, and hence we are about to become a trash society.

What’s trash and what’s not?

To me it has been inspiring to think that in any object around us is materialized the thoughts of the person who made it. It’s like the designer or the maker of a product has put in this product a piece of themselves, and that piece continues living in the object. So the object is always  a mixture of their thoughts and skills. If these thoughts and skills are superior, the object feels great. This inexplicable feeling we translate as  good quality. If the thoughts and skills for making an object have been poor or suspicious, that shows in the object too.

Similarly, we project meanings to things around us. Well-made objects to which we can connect stories value more than meaningless, storyless objects.

Think about everything you have in your home in terms of quality and personal meaning. You find:

1)     1) Objects that are high quality but personally meaningless. These things you are happy to recycle: to sell or give forward.

2)     2) Objects that are high quality and personally meaningful. These objects you want to keep and cherish, pass on in the family.

3)     3) Objects that are poor quality but personally meaningful. Gifts, self made objects that you don’t have the heart to throw away.

4)     4) Objects that are poor quality and personally meaningless. This useless trash you want to get rid of.

      Say no to meaningless bad quality. Buy things from second hand or buy things that last.  Imagine ownership as something that passes from one person to other. Ask all brands to launch their own vintage shops.

It’s time to say goodbye. Goodbye to buying stuff you don’t need. Goodbye toys that break when you get them out of the box. Goodbye cheap cotton clothes. Goodbye fast cycle fashion and interior trends. Goodbye wasteful lifestyles that make us feel so bad. End of story.

 

Production designer Markku Pätilä finds beauty in deserted places

One evening in the early 1990s Markku Perälä is sitting at a bar. He meets with with Aki Kaurismäki and starts drinking with him. When the bar closes, Markku invites Aki over to his place. When Aki sees Markku's apartment, he asks: “Would you like to work as a production designer?” Markku says yes.

Markku Perälä is an artist who sees beauty in places others don’t. For almost twenty years he and his colleague Jukka Salmi have created those peculiarly beautiful sets for Aki Kaurismäki’s films, where time has stopped and left the space and its objects to play their own quiet tune. Pätilä has found perfect sets from deserted factories, empty apartment buildings, private houses, and one demolished theatre in France. Sometimes, like in the case of the Man Without the Past, everything was built from scratch.

"It’s about having a similar sense of humor. Production design is not solo work, and it’s not separate from the story. Rather, it is framing the story in a way that brings out its beauty. Every detail matters."

It’s not uncommon that directors expect production design to be completed in four weeks. “That’s pretty intensive”, Markku sighs. "Ten weeks would be ideal".

Every production design requires background work during which one needs to get all possible information on the subject and see what kinds of objects would complement the story. "Museums, old magazines and product catalogs are great resources, and so are Taschen’s decennial design books", ” Markku explains and hands out an Anttila’s product catalog from 1959-1960. “This has everything from curtains hangers to soaps.”

Markku creates worlds that look and feel real.  Helsingin Sanomat wrote that the Man Without the Past had been filmed in a real container village for homeless people. The truth was, however, that seven men built that village from scratch in four weeks.

At the moment Markku is making a movie about the life of Olavi Virta, the king of Finnish tango. “For those sets we need all kinds of things from 1930s to1960s.”

 

  

Image: Markku Pätilä, more images on Thinglink

"Ethics and Aesthetics - Ecological Design in Finland and Norway" seminar notes

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.

Ecological design beyond good and beautiful

Notes for moderating "Ethics and Aesthetics", a seminar on ecological design at the Nordic Investment Bank in Helsinki

The ideas of ecological design became to common awareness first as individual activism in the 1970s, then as brand building in 1990s, and finally, as global political movement in the new millennium.

For designers, ecological design has been both a hopeful vision and a pragmatic tool to make better things in better ways. It has mainly provided specific ways of minimizing energy and material use and reducing pollution, but also ideas for preserving habitat, restoring ecosystems and inventing landscapes.

Instead of (or, at least in addition to) asking for the lowest price, a growing number of consumers have become interested in where products come from and what they are made of. New ecolabels, standards and auditing tools have been popping out like mushrooms after the rain.

The popularity of ecotourism, organic food, improved energy literacy, and ecological footprint measurement echoes a new lifestyle that is more conscious and concern about what we are doing to our environment.

Sometimes this lifestyle costs giving up some personal comfort, like in the case of lowering your basic room temperature, eating less meat, or using public transportation. At the same time it feels good to be able to stand out and act to be a better person.

Some are still asking: “Can ecological design be good business?” Well, “will people always choose the less expensive option over the ecological option, and is the ecological option always the more expensive?” Yes, no, and no. Let’s take organic food, for example. Although Fair Trade bananas often cost 20 cents more than Chiquitas, even poor students in Finland more often choose the fair.

Ilkka Suppanen told me today: “We Scandinavians think that designing wooden stools is ecological design. But to be honest, who cares about wooden stools?” Suppanen is dead right. He also believes that the new generation of designers will think beyond the product from the very beginning.

The new generation consumers are different too. They buy less material and more immaterial goods, they buy second hand, local, and recycle as much as possible. And whatever they do, they do it online.

The US bank crisis and the following economical downturn changed the global consumption of new high-end products. The sales of luxury goods plunged in everywhere else than China in 2008-2009. Due to this, all design manufacturers are now rethinking their business models. Can stronger ecological arguments help them to reposition favorably on the market, or are they all just going to China?

Aalto combines three universities to get better ideas

I joined the International Design Business Management (IDBM) program at the Helsinki School of Economics in 1997. The two-year program gave me access to two other universities, the Helsinki University of Technology and the Helsinki University of Art and Design.  

12 years later, I’m standing at the Finlandia Hall with 2500 other guests watching the grand opening of the new Aalto University, and witnessing these three universities becoming one.

Perhaps the 1995 founded IDBM program served as a test bed and working prototype for the new Aalto collaboration. During my own studies I was convinced of at least one thing: knowing how people think in other fields cannot be harmful for anybody who ever has to deal with creating delivering new things and solutions to the world. Eventually essential is: 1) does one have anything to say 2) how well one can frame it 3) who gets interested. 

New ideas typically emerge at the boundaries and crossing points of different disciplines, on the grey fields that are nobody’s responsibility or in anybody’s interest. In these fields there are constantly opening and closing meeting points that are too unclear to be stated or staffed. Still, it is exactly in these fuzzy terrains in which the fruits of a carefully and creatively conducted dialogue can help Aalto meet its expectations. 

As the university's new president Tuula Teeri stated in her opening speech, we’re all global citizens and today’s challenges are too complex to be solved by one discipline or nation alone. The request to collaborate across disciplines, institutions, nations and continents is ever growing.

Perhaps not everyone in the Aalto community is yet happy together, because it is more comfortable to be alone or with likeminded people than with those who think or act differently. Now each member of Aalto has to decide for oneself, how they want to greet the new.

Some are afraid their professional identity and agency fades and becomes forgotten if money is only directed to the three power areas (marketing, design, technology), where it seems to offer the quickest and most obvious return. But this worry may prove wrong, since it certainly is not only the mainstream elements that will push Aalto ahead of its competitors.

 
The new president Tuula Teeri held part of her opening speech in Second Life.