Helsinki Design Lab helps government leaders see the "architecture of problems." We assist decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solutions that consider all aspects of a problem. Our mission is to advance this way of working—we call it strategic design.
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Over at frog design they've been talking about what it is that designers do, and have proposed a rather interesting pivot for the conversation: magic. As they tell it the world has two kinds of designers, those who are pro-magic and those who are not.
In the first camp: “What we do has nothing to do with magic! We design objects and interactions for people, in the clearest and most logical way... We help people survive in the world.” In other words, design is about function, purpose, usability.In the second camp: “Of COURSE what we do is magic! We are nothing if not magicians, making the impossible real, bringing the just-out-of-reach right into the palms of our hands. Whether objects, or experiences, we create the moment of wonder and delight.” In other words, design is about meaning, emotion, even transcendence, if you will.
This sharp distinction seems a little overzealous, though. Like many things, the answer is somewhere in between. Design practiced well should always have a purpose and function, and to do that it must often "[make] the impossible real." The fact that designers work from conception to implementation is a unique professional obligation and involves the resolution of conflicts and impossibilities of all sorts into a seamless and singular material reality. That itself is a kind of magic.
To actually produce an object or service the designer must rectify conflicting client desires, material behaviors, economic envelopes, and numerous other requirements. This is the really hard part. If the designer is successful, these disparate inputs are dissolved into a wash of intention – as if by magic – and the resultant thing just works in ways equally delightful and useful.
The difficulty of implementation is one of the reasons why "design thinking" is not enough. Putting aside for now a lengthy but necessary discussion about rebooting the practice of design and the way we educate our designers, "design thinking" is only half of the value proposition. A design proposal, no matter how insightful, clever, and well researched is only ever a mere tiptoe into the journey. The success of good design is always the result of combined thinking and doing.
Try out any of the numerous iPhone lookalikes to understand the importance of a continuous spectrum from idea to final product. Even with the same feature set, aesthetics, and ambitions, every iClone I've tried pales in comparison to the original. If there's magic in design it's the practical magic of making any friction between abstract possibilities (ideas!) and material reality (things!) disappear. This, finally, is design thinking and design stewardship working in conjunction to deliver work of the highest caliber.
This was another week of infrastructure. Most importantly that involved launching a call for participation (and eventually tenders) to build a new website that will be part of HDL. Navigating the public procurement system in Finland has been an interesting learning experience for us, but we're on the right track now and looking forward to being able to actually start work on that project in November. As an aside, anyone interested in a serious innovation challenge would do well to look at procurement policies. Ripe territory there.
On Monday I'll be in Barcelona meeting with the talented people behind Constructing Communication who will be developing the visual identity for the new HDL site. We're excited to work with such talented people.
I finally found a cheap place in Helsinki to have large format drawings plotted out. This was celebrated by printing up a single calendar spanning from October 2009 though September 2010 which yields a new perspective to the project. It's equal parts "wow there are a lot of days between now and then" and "oh crap we have to get moving fast." Marco added the first item: he's taking a well deserved Fall holiday with his family starting next week.
This week was a swirl of names: meeting new faces, lots of meetings all over Helsinki (and Lahti!), and the banal-but-critical task of naming a new project.
To start with the new additions to the team, I'd like to welcome Adriel, Ezra, and Justin to the project. Justin is a Sitra colleague who will now be devoting part of his time to HDL, and Adriel and Ezra are working with us as consultants. It has taken us a while to tweak the machinery here to be able to fold in new talent on a just-in-time basis, but now that infrastructure is set up and it's a huge help.
Adriel, Ezra, and Justin will take the lead on developing studio briefs for three studios that we are organizing for next summer in the lead-up to the main HDL event. The studios will each tackle a specific challenge here in Finland, but the problems are large issues relevant to many places. In other words, they're juicy problems. On the meta level we're looking at public service delivery, education, and a national approach to sustainability. Clearly these are vast topics, so within each one there will be a much more focused question or entry point, but we're still working to identify those. I'll leave it at that and let Adriel, Ezra, and Justin share more about their work once we collectively dig into the content a bit more.
It's an exciting moment because we're finally beginning to lock in dates, focus conversations on specific content, and clearly outline the challenges ahead of us (at least as best as we can see them). More later on these studios and their role as part of HDL, but for now it's enough to say that things are getting busy around here!
Internally we've been laboring to find the right name for a new part of HDL. This summer it became clear that a conference is probably not a strong enough vehicle to achieve our ambitions. Helsinki Design Lab needs to be an engine for fostering strategic design knowledge and capability. There are groups here and there devoting their thinking to strategic design and there are ongoing projects in various parts of the world demonstrating the value of having designers involved in sorting out systemic problems. In short, there's a good bit of chatter, but we want to see more. A conference that happens every two years is a good start but what else can we do?
We have lots of ideas... but I'll leave it at that for now and invite any suggestions you may have.
After spending a day with the product design experts and generally brilliant people at BERG London I’ve decided to borrow their habit of weekly reporting on the progress of the work at hand. Twenty nine weeks ago we officially kicked off the Helsinki Design Lab 2010 project and it feels like we’re now finally coming to a point of clarity. The many great conversations Marco and I’ve had with various people in London this week helped confirm that. Things feel right.
At the Royal College of Art Rama Gheerawo and Maja Kecman, friends of HDL, were kind enough to take time out of their busy schedule preparing for a celebration of the Helen Hamlyn Centre’s 10th anniversary showing 100 projects. Great to see so much work in one small place.
Geoff Mulgan and his team at the Young Foundation shared their work on formalizing knowledge about social innovation and, more generally, the need for design to adjust itself to the opportunities at hand. Specifically, that a focus on being able to back up our claims with evidence will help designers gain traction in conversations with political decision makers and that a stronger focus on the stewardship of implementation is required to deliver strong successes. Music to my ears.
The Methods work – online in the new year – was a collaboration with NESTA, who were kind enough to host us for a discussion about their work in The Lab (popular term). Kerry McCarthy rightly pointed out that one of the difficulties in lab/pilot/prototype work is achieving successful transferability, of new knowledge and methods, to a different context. To make a gross generalization, this seems like a challenge for design at large. As a community, we’re good at perpetuating fundamental things like the studio/critique model of design education, but could generally be better about knowledge transfer within the community.
Over at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), Matthew Taylor and Emily Campbell put forward a provocative idea: design is a tool for self reliance. Helping people think like designers gives them additional tools to solve their own problems, and assisting institutions to better understand the value of design helps eliminate those problems in the first place. How can design contribute to people achieving the future they want?
Some of those ideas came up at the Design Council as well, where Marianne Guldbrandsen hosted me for a long conversation about many things, including how the Council has been devoting more attention to design as a tool for understanding through ethnography and field research. By influencing design policy, developing new skills and education capability within the UK design community, and sponsoring demonstration projects that make the case for the value of design, the Council is up to many interesting things.
Tom Loosemore of 4IP was kind enough to let Marco and I pick his brain on the challenges of funding socially beneficial projects from a venture capital perspective. 4IP’s investments in new media represent a really exciting expansion of the notion of media, public service, and business opportunity. Tom’s insistence that the challenge of running a business is a useful test for any good idea was a nice wake up call. At the end of the day, everything we do should generate value in some way, right?
The question of value continued as a thread in my discussion with Inderpaul Johar of Architecture00 too. Inderpaul is the rare sort who can speak fluently about architecture and finance and policy in an incredibly thoughtful and articulate way. One big question that came out of our chat was the nature of design education today: what’s missing? Indy has a lot of ideas.
As an architect myself, it’s nice to see the architecture scene in London active in this discussion. Sarah Ichioka, who has been running the Architecture Foundation for about a year now, is fostering a larger discussion about reshaping spatial practice. I was disappointed to have missed Paul Nakazawa’s lecture at the AF, but not surprised in the slightest that he’s part of the conversation here. Paul’s experience consulting architecture offices around the world about the business challenges of running their practices, about the changing role of the architect, and about the intricacies of practice in an international context is a true resource.
At the end of this busy week, weary from waking up a little too early to be on a conference call with our legal team, I’m taking a bit of time to relax with a coffee at the stylish Modern Pantry in St. John’s Square. My brain will be crunching through these many great conversations for weeks to come but for now I’m heading back to Helsinki. Till next time, London!
Interviewed in the Architect's Newspaper yesterday, celebrated British architect David Adjaye responds candidly to some very direct questions about the financial troubles that his practice has faced, and is now recovering from. This is worth pointing out for two reasons.
It's great that he's willing to admit that things were difficult! So often in the design professions we do everything we can to keep a clean portfolio, a straight face, and an air of effortless accomplishment. But practitioners do fall down, they do make mistakes, and they do occasionally suffer because of it. The question is how you learn and recover from those challenges (and sometimes failures too). The more designers are actively sharing their experiences of both success and failure, the more we can collectively figure out ways to gracefully overcome challenges.
Secondly, it's great to see Adjaye reflecting on his own experience setting up his practice as a studio and a business. The world has changed a lot since the studio model of design education was developed in the 19th century: what should we do to bridge that gap? I'll let Adjaye address this question:
Schools are woefully unconnected to the idea of the profession being entrepreneurial. We were all graduating and trying to get into employment right away. This generation is very different, because they’re paying off their debts. In my day in London, it was still very much in the grant system. Your education wasn’t a noose around your neck in terms of repayment. It was almost like free, and you were very ready to take on the world and come into the world. There was more risk-taking.
It's always a little sad to come across a blog that has gone fallow. Sorry, world, but we hope to do a better job of posting regularly in the future.
In truth, it's hard for me to accept that it was five months ago that I was in Los Angeles giving the first sneak peak into what HDL 2010 will be. In the intervening months Marco and I have been spending a lot of time hashing out both the ambitions for HDL and seeking a reasonable way to see it through. Part of this process has been looking for examples of projects that are demonstrating the efficacy of strategic design tackling complex problems. Have any favorites? Leave us a comment below if you do!
While we've been quietly developing HDL, Sitra has been more visibly at work organizing Low2No: A Sustainable Development Competition centered around an urban block and HQ building in Jätkäsaari. With the centralization of Helsinki's ports to single new site, six separate logistical areas are being vacated. The competition site, Jätkäsaari, offers about a square kilometer of new land adjacent to central Helsinki for development. In other words, it's a fantastic opportunity that cities as established as Helsinki rarely find. But with this opportunity comes a challenge: to use existing models of development will ensure that our current out-of-balance lifestyle continues--massive resource consumption and carbon output. Can the design of one block be used as a catalyst to design and demonstrate new approaches to development that are not only sustainable but restorative and replicable?
From a competitive pool of 74 replies to our Request For Qualifications five teams were selected to develop proposals:
- ARUP – Sauerbruch Hutton – Experientia – Galley Eco Capital
- Bjarke Ingels Group, BIG – Vahanen – ARUP Foresight Innovation – Transsolar Energietechnik – Anttinen Oiva Arkkitehdit AoA – Masu Planning – Passiivitalo.fi – Pasi Mäenpää – Mikko Jalas
- Peter Rose & Partners – Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates – Guy Nordenson and Associates – Matthias Schuler, Transsolar Climate Engineering – Mobility in Chain – ARO Architectural Research Office
- REX/Croxton Collaborative/NOW – Transsolar Energietechnik – Magnusson Klemencic Associates – Bureau Bas Smets – 2x4 – Arup New York – Front – Jonathan Rose Companies
- WSP Group – Heatherwick Studios – B&M Architects – JK MM Architects – Space Syntax – Helsinki University – AA Palmberg Ltd – Pekka Himanen – Pauli Aalto-Setälä
By now the teams have completed their proposals and the winner will be announced on September 1st. If you live in Finland or happen to be in Helsinki on the first, please join us for the announcement cocktail hour and a chance to chat with the teams. You can find the practical details of the event here.
There are few places that could serve as a better platform for a discussion about architecture and the city than the roof of a skyscraper, smack in the center of Los Angeles. Last week Postopolis! LA convened a group of more than 40+ speakers for five days of near-constant conversation. I was pleased to be able to participate by sharing the story of Helsinki Design Lab 1968, a bit about where we're going with HDL 2010, and to introduce the Low2No competition that Sitra recently launched.
Photo from Storefront for Art & Architecture on Flickr.
It was great to see some old friends and meet many new ones, but I particularly want to highlight the way that Postopolis! LA came to be. On this blog we've been describing different kinds of innovation, and Postopolis! is no exception. Unlike most events which have a central organizer, Postopolis! was hosted by six bloggers from five different cities, all enabled and made fluid through online collaboration tools. Think about that for a minute. The images and ideas from Eric Rodenbeck's presentation about data visualization, Benjamin Ball's design by process, and Ben Cerveny's thought-wander through the territory of the city as operating system will be playing on repeat in my head for a long while, but the quiet triumph of Postopolis! LA was its own formatting – the very nature of the event as a unique collaboration might just be the most impressive part of all. (This may mean we have too much event-planning on the brain...)
Now that we're all back to Helsinki to rest up and let these experiences soak in, this blog will probably be a bit slow for a while. In the mean time, you can browse the Twitter stream from Postopolis for extensive notes, excerpts, and the occasional dérive.
Is political protest a relic of the 20th century? In a way, this is the question that The Hope Institute asks here in Seoul. As a non-profit that runs a number of different advocacy and education programs, the Hope Institute proposes that "social invention" can replace protest as an effective tool for improving the quality of daily life. Over the past two years they've collected more than 16,000 ideas and are actively prototyping some of them.
In some of their most interesting work the Hope Institute uses crowdsourcing to collect ideas that can improve various aspects of living in Korea, from tweaks to the Metro system to alternate farming practices. After collecting advice from the people on the ground, Hope Institute brings together various stakeholders (be they government, business, or other communities) to join in one conversation about the problem at hand and then prototypes solutions and publishes their findings.
Photo from Arne Hendriks on Flickr.
One ambitious project they're working on is to change the visual experience of Korea's busy streets. With little regulation applying to the way that signs and advertisements are applied to building facades, the streets can quickly become a cacophony of sales pitches. Hope Institute's "Sign is Design" program hosts the municipal offices in charge of signage, the sign owners, and the sign designers in a single conversation so that all parties can work together to find a more orderly and pleasing way to deal with signage. Recently they adopted one of the rundown streets in Busan's old city center and applied their process to redo the all of the signs. If this were all for the sake of a more beautiful street we could note its improvement briefly, but post-renovation shop owners have noted that foot traffic and sales are both up. This increase in business is the direct outcome of good design being applied to a problem at all levels, from the strategy of bringing together all the stakeholders down to the graphic design of the individual signs.
If you speak Korean you may enjoy watching this presentation by Hong Ilpyo from LIFT ASIA '08, Research Fellow at the Hope Institute, where he talks about more of Hope Institute's work. The Q&A is in English and starts about 15 minutes in.
From the top of the ArcoTower in Anyang, a town in the southern reaches of the Seoul metropolitan area, it was quite clear what happens when a functionalist approach is taken to urban design: you get a city comprised of rubber stamp blocks, each the result of some generic equation optimized for things like "habitation units" and traffic flows. Top down planning can be quite efficient and was an important tool in South Korea's rapid urbanization in the latter half of the 20th century, but while growth rates may change quickly, concrete stays put much longer. In other words, buildings and cities planned with only the near future in mind may be immediate successes, but can quickly morph into liabilities when looked at over the span of multiple generations.
Photo: Anyang, South Korea photographed by Yong27 on Flickr.
Mr. Ohn Yeong-Te, President of the Architectue & Urban Research Institute (AURI), crystalized the problem that architects face when trying to improve the quality of the built environment by stating that designers are responsible to three parties: the people who live their daily lives in and around buildings, the businesses which rely on the smooth function of the city and its structures to ply their trade, and broader society which deserves high quality architecture that may become "tomorrow's cultural heritage." These different levels of responsibility relate to various strata of decision making from the grass roots all the way up to national policy. Without a perspective that incorporates design input at all levels of decision making it's very difficult to deliver high quality buildings.
This eloquent description of a need for planning that is integrated and informed from top to bottom was further expanded upon by Cho Sang-Kyu, Manager of AURI's Architecture and Urban Information Center, who described the need for architects to collaborate horizontally across disciplines. As society puts increasing demands on our buildings (it must be green! it should sustain itself financially!) the architect finds that they must work directly with other disciplines to deliver the informed perspective that is required of them.
Although AURI's work is at the national level (they report to the Parliament of South Korea), Anyang was the perfect place for this discussion about the potential of design-informed decision to result in high quality spaces. With iniatives like the Anyang Public Art Project, the city itself is actively looking for solutions to the rubber-stamp urbanism they've inheretied from the mass-production past.
Later in the day, a visit to the buzzing offices of Cho Minsuk, Principal of Mass Studies, provided some context to the discussion at AURI. Where are the precedents for this kind of integrated thinking amongst the community of designers? I'll sign off now with this as an open question to you: Which architects and designers are finding clever ways to insert themselves into these larger questions? Who do you look to for role models in this area?
On our last day of meetings in Bangalore, we had the pleasure to visit Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology where Geetha Narayanan shared with us a bit of the history of her ground-breaking school and some of the opportunities and challenges facing educators working in India today. Geetha and her team have built a wonderful momentum within their school which has grown from an inaugural class of one single student in 1996 to an enrollment of over 250 today.
A theme that comes up again and again as we visit educators in different countries is the need for designers to be better trained to operate outside the bubble of art and design. It was great to hear Geetha flesh out the term "design education" beyond the training of designers to include something akin to the concept of the embedded designer I described previously. With the collaborative, studio-style approach gaining popularity in all levels of education from primary up through grad school, it's exciting to note that these students are learning new ways to think about and see the world in addition to the content of their various subjects.
To imagine that a pedagogy which uses design to helps students better understand the world could be taking root in one of the planet's most populous countries is an exciting proposition indeed. Being here for a few days has given us time to get only the smallest peek into life in India, but it was enough time to clarify how great the opportunities are for even the smallest of innovations in a place as vast, populous, and talent-filled as this.
