One year ago.
I was fooled by the warm light, really. Expecting Istanbul to be warm in March was rather shortsighted of me.
It’s hard to imagine a place with a color palette such as Istanbul’s ever being cold, but even Hannibal’s elephants made it to the Alps.
Istanbul was cooler than expected, but every bit as bountiful.
It’s is a city of stacks and piles. Domes, buildings, chestnuts. Histories. Piles and promise.
For LLL.
Two years ago today I moved to Helsinki. Having missed the anniversary last time, I’ve gone out of my way to remember the date this year. I try to compare the duration of my residency to grad school or to the time BB,CS,LB,TE and I spent on DeepLeap. Has this felt half as long as grad school? Twice as long as that time in Austin? Time is a fickle shade.
Some reflections on the city of Helsinki and my life in and around it.
April 2, 2010
Even after two years, Helsinki is still largely inscrutable. In particular, the local habit for covering ground floor windows in shops and various commercial spaces with posters confuses me. You find this walking around the outer fringes of Kamppi or the fuzzy edges of Punavuori. What happens in these protected spaces? In a place with little light and few people, why retreat even more? Opacity is special here in a way I have yet to unlock.
May 7, 2010
My favorite breakfast of 2010 was an ad-hoc assortment of unexpected delights, consumed on a day when the air was crisp with promise. Finland can be amazing at breakfast time. Milk that comes in beer bottles, pea tendrils on bread, a pillow of cheese, and milk chocolate? See also: special opacity. Thanks to Jenna and Anni for this.
June 9, 2010
May and June were a single day. Even looking at (lots of) photos now I have difficulty remembering that period of time in any plural unit. Largely because I was so consumed by the studios that I was organizing with the rest of the team at work. This is a snapshot from one of those studios, on a day when we visited the Aalto house to have a small team dinner. Alberto and I lingered in front of the house taking pictures as everyone else filed inside and I snapped this just as Emily popped her head out to look for Alberto. The simple gesture of looking again is rendered so touchingly here by Emily that this photo is very special to me. These two people had met three days before and yet already they and their collaborators shared a unique amity. It makes me happy to think that our project created moments like this. In its many quiet pockets—the forecourt of a confident house, say—Helsinki can be a city of remarkable hospitality.
July 10, 2010
Petri’s excitement about the fire was only multiplied when I introduced the special delight of smores (with digestive biscuits instead of graham crackers) to our picnic.
August 26, 2010
A tour of the plants at the botanical gardens prophetically ended here. It had been a hectic month of small pieces loosely joined. I was ferrying between desks in Kallio, Ruoholahti, and Punavuori. Working late hours. Working weekends. Pulling things together.
September 3, 2010
This was minutes after we wrapped the event that I moved to Helsinki to put together. Well before this image was taken, even before the event started, I knew that the idea of my moving to Helsinki to produce an event was a conceit. I’m tempted to believe that the reason Marco is smiling because he knew this all along. I was exhausted but proud and all I remember of the dinner that followed this photo is that it was good.
October 17, 2010
Douglas came to visit and we took day trips to Turku and Tallinn, both of which are parallel Helsinkis to a non-native. Geography is surprisingly complicit with the rules of mathematics: (T+T)/2 = H? Fall had settled into the trees by then and the shadows were starting to run long.
November 11, 2010
When a tiny tear of sky rips open during fall it’s a special thing. This morning I was headed to Tel Aviv where the temperature was 20 degrees warmer and the sky 120 degrees around the color wheel.
December 7, 2010
Walking through Plague Park rarely saves any time but it’s hard to ignore during fall, spring, and winter when it’s liable to be beautiful. In summer it smells like a toilet, because it is a toilet. Apparently a significant percentage of Helsinki is not potty trained.
January 25, 2011
Weekend mornings I make a pot of coffee and stretch bits of work out across my long desk. When the sun is low like this is reminds me of Cambridge and the mornings I spent there dull-eyed and unshaven, sipping coffee and listening to Concord avenue wake up. From my apartment in the center of Helsinki I rarely hear any traffic. The soundtrack to this photo is the heavy rumble of the #3 tram lumbering by. To an American that’s what Europe sounds like. Trams.
February 27, 2011
Cities each have their own best scale. San Francisco congeals at the scale of the neighborhood. Manhattan is a place of heroic battles fought within each plot’s zoning envelope. Helsinki is composed street by street.
No one here seems to be able to identify the neighborhoods reliably, and while many of the buildings are interesting few are captivating. Streets here, on the other hand, are artful. Humans are small in a city whose scale is the street. Maybe this is why doorways are often diminutive in Helsinki.
Morning: coffee and to-dos. Lists, logistics, and schedules. Dialing in–that is, tuning, not bytes.
Between: Before lunch rolls around the first crisis has landed. It’s not a real crisis but it’s something that needs attention in a marginally more urgent fashion than everything else. Either that or you’re already asleep somewhere up above 35,000 feet.
Lunch: quick but never hasty. Better when it’s long followed by a longer coffee.
Afternoon: The to-do list is now a half-useless piece of paper. It can neither be used to record new information, being full, nor be thrown away, being not fully marked off. Progress is quicker than expected but never fast enough. Thoughts now turn to medium term goals, defining aspects of projects and qualifying the Things To Be Done. This step feels both useless and absolutely necessary.
Sunset: It’s possible that you observe the sunset through the oval portholes of a jetplane. If so, sleep well. Otherwise, the day’s thoughts about strategy, policy, and “innovation systems” are slowing down.
Night: Where highfalutin thoughts have rested, new bits bubble up: pricing models, impediments, skill profiles, mechanisms of commitment, occasionally a walnut or two.
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Meeting, by chance, in San Francisco Ben asked me, “Are you still in convection?”
An important date slipped by last week without my even noticing it. Caught up in the hubbub of work, the anniversary of my move to Helsinki came and went without a moment of reflection.
As the inherited template of Important Days becomes less and less relevant, I find myself seeking events of my own choosing to celebrate with whatever seems most appropriate. Who doesn’t claim to hate celebrating their birthday? And do we really need to keep up the charade of celebrating some guy’s winter birthday by putting up decorated pine trees? I’d rather pick new days and wrap them in new rituals.
The anniversary of moving from one continent to another feels like a pretty significant thing. Particularly this move, as it was the culmination of an awkward and difficult period of migration between Europe and America spanning August 2008 to March 2009. I moved to Finland with two suitcases and a credit card ready for Ikea. I expected a new life but was foolishly unprepared for the extent to which that would become true.
This is an easy place to move to and an easy place to like, but in some ways it’s a difficult place to love. Helsinki, more than many most cities I’ve lived in, holds its cards close. The best moments of my time here have been spent in the homes of friends, tucked in the corner of public spaces, or deep within the irrepressible beauty of Finland’s forests and parks. As with the glorious summer that follows Finland’s long winter, Helsinki rewards commitment and the longer I stay the more its wonders reveal themselves to me.
Three hundred and seventy days later and I finally find myself at home on my own street – in this city I’m starting to know.
I am lucky enough to have an incredible job which puts me up to unusual things. Like visiting five continents for research. In one month. November was pretty unique. I visited London, New York, Santiago, Sydney, Torquay, Melbourne, Singapore, and Beijing in the span of 25 days. Seeing such a wide variety of climates (meteorologically, economically), geographies, and cultures has stretched my brain in new ways. This trip will leave a mark on me.
Idleness
On my first visit to mainland China the most striking thing was the sheer number of people who are employed by idleness. My experience was probably a bit skewed by staying in the middle of the embassy district where literally every building is attended to 24 hours a day by a plank-straight guard, but buildings all over the city are similarly kept company.
The way that idleness is handled seems to me a useful way to understand a culture. In India something like a simple transaction in a store involves two or three more people than it would in the west. Cultures in warm climates generally tolerate a greater degree of loitering – doing nothing but watching the sun pass through the sky. In Europe and North America we stuff our idle people into offices. On paper these people look employed but there’s a reason that Windows comes with Solitaire installed. In China everything is guarded.
Vanishing of the Vanishing Point
Arriving around Midnight, I slip into Beijing under the cover of darkness. The cold is a shock after being in the southern hemisphere for two weeks but everywhere it smells lightly, pleasantly of burning things. From the width of the roads alone it’s clear that Beijing is a big place, but it’s not until the next morning that I wake up early and hop in a cab to visit some sites that the size becomes palpable. That smell of burning reveals itself as a mix of coal and dust and who knows what. Avenues fade to blue; everything beyond 100 meters is a silhouette in the smog.
As a visitor it’s pathetically easy for me to put aside the sad reality of the pollution and its long-term effects on the people who live there. For the moment I’m in thrall with the incredible optics of a city that is so vast it yields the potential for, but ultimately denies, infinite vistas with vanishing points in every cardinal direction. These forever-boulevards literally choked by smog are tragically beautiful with something akin to the sad sadism of foie gras. In so many ways, Beijing is the foie gras of cities: ethically complicated but undeniably exquisite.
It’s a city that any kid who grew up with video games already knows: the Z-buffer culling of distant objects to reduce render time is exactly what dense smog produces. Successive layers of massive buildings and leafless trees rendered as increasingly pale outlines encapsulate you in a little sphere of existence, your own little microcosm of the endless city, as if seeing the whole thing at once would simply require too much processing power from your human brain. Please upgrade your buffers before you visit the city of the future.
Beijing has vanquished the vanishing point. What’s next?
Elasticity
Between the events of my personal life and the myriad places I’ve visited and people I’ve met for work during the course of this year, I keep returning to an earnest appreciation for the ultimate elasticity of the human condition.
On every continent, in every income bracket, under diverse conditions, what I’m in awe of these past few months is the ability of humanity to cope, to make due, and to recover. I’ve watched people close to me suffer life threatening injury, give birth to children, get married, get divorced, freak out, cash out, break things, die. But we keep going.
Light bouncing off those trillion tiny molecules of water in the body of a fog: this is reading San Francisco in the original. Every place has its own way of expressing volume to its visitors, of showing us how to think about the act of containing and being contained. London has its parks, New York has its grid, and San Francisco has its weather. On my last of four nights in the city I’m glad to have had one that was not clear. Empty skies are the enemy of anyone who hopes to visit San Francisco; without fog it’s just scenography.
Tall buildings caught in the volumetric light of a San Francisco night have me pondering whether it is the land that gives foundation to the towers, or the towers themselves that began with penthouses and shaped the topography by growing downward. Pushing and cracking the earth of the bay into hills and valleys in an act of hyper literal settling.
Twelve hours later, along the hollow center of an anonymous corporate campus: steady winds render the surface of an artificial lake into a conveyor belt moving fast and consistent against the shore. Water ends cleanly in land and perpetually keeps doing so with no margin or edge. The illusion is pulled off through a careful balance of sight lines, retaining walls, and a natural-looking distribution of “shore material” that erase any break of the waves.
Although efforts to lump San Francisco into some larger Bay Area are overzealous, these vignettes bracket my time in Northern California well: a pure beauty, a beautiful artifice, a careful contest.
Unexpected, but we seem to be getting back to the old sort of writing that used to be on this site.
When I left California two weeks ago life seemed like an abstraction, a collection of letters and numbers splayed across the page with little hint of their kinetic potential. Having arrived to Helsinki, acquired a Finnish social security number, found an apartment and stuffed some furniture in it, and then took off on the Helsinki Design Lab 2010 (sort of) Grand Tour, I am here to report that my brain is currently oscillating through perpendicular planes of excitement and exhaustion.
Last week I departed Helsinki to meet up with my colleague Marco Steinberg in balmy Singapore. Marco runs the Strategic Design Unit at Sitra, which I am part of, and has been traveling westward around this little planet since the 10th of March. As I write this Marco and our colleague Pia are making their way back to the shores of Finland, but I am continuing the tour to Seoul, Honolulu, and Los Angeles over the next two weeks.
If you plan to attend Postopolis LA you’ll be able to see me present a more complete picture of what we’re up to on April 3rd, but for those that will not make it to California you may enjoy the blog we’ve been keeping on this Tour. If you’re in Honolulu, I’ll be hosting a lunchtime salon at the University of Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies on April 1st, thanks to a kind invite from Stuart Candy.
You’re Going To Get Sick Of Me Talking About This…
…But let me try to lay out a brief vision for Helsinki Design Lab 2010, the 3rd in a series of events that started in 1968 on the island of Suomenlinna. Our goal for 2010 is to put the emphasis on doing. There are plenty of great design conferences that offer their participants an opportunity to meet great people, see good work, and talk about powerpoint slides. We’re interested in something different: we want to give our guests the opportunity to work together on real problems.
This will be a small event where designers sit at the same table as experts from the business, academic, and policy communities in a collaborative team. Our guests will meet with stakeholders within Finland who face significant challenges in their own domain (health care, education, industry, etc). The idea of HDL is then to charrette on specific, bracketed problems in search of two outcomes: a road map for their strategic rethinking and the identification of discrete opportunities that may be turned in to pilot projects. We believe strongly in using specific, tangible problems as a way to unlock the complexity that besots the massive, tangled issues which society faces today. For instance, everyone knows that health care needs help (even in a place like Finland!), but what exactly is the problem? What is the terrain of the health care? HDL 2010 will use Sitra’s unique position as a government agency to offer a framework and resources to help clarify these questions by applying the skills and mindset of the designer to strategic issues.
We’re interested in changing the world but realize that it’s going to take a while. If HDL 2010 succeeds it will be because the event proves the value of having designers involved with decisions at the highest levels of business and national policy. The problems we choose to tackle will be used as case studies that affirm a process which may be replicated in other contexts, thus making the proceedings of HDL 2010 relevant beyond the confines of Finland. After all, no single country owns climate change just as no single corporation can fix health care: these issues require a framework that is agnostic to borders of all kinds.
What’s up, Bangalore? (And ARN, LHR, BOS, SFO, NRT, SIN, HKG, ICN, HNL, LAX…)
This is the basic question we’ve been asking of each stop on the tour. We set out from Helsinki to check in with people around the planet who have a similar mindset about the potential of design to create meaningful impact beyond the shaping of objects. HDL 2010 will be a prototyping lab but we’re humble enough to realize that our efforts will be small compared to the number and diversity of problems out there in the world. This is why it’s important for us to escape the confines of Finland, see what’s happening everywhere else, and learn what keeps the rest of the world moving.
Are you redesigning your world? If so, we gotta talk.
The best cities – usually also the largest – are prototyping engines that use the abundance of their density to ceaselessly test new ideas for material accumulations (buildings, vehicles, things), abstract systems (laws, regulations, even languages), and ways of life. This, I argue, is the source of the effervescence that any good city exhibits. The city is exciting because it’s always new in a million little ways. In a similar way the non-city, the rural, is exciting because its vaccuum presents persistant challenges. If the mode of the city is becoming, the mode of the rural is a constant overcoming.
The thing about prototypes is that they are by definition a temporary condition to be replaced by subsequent iterations. Prototypes turn into products and those products get deployed. While 80% of the US may now reside in places nominally deemed “cities,” this is not an undifferentiated term. Amongst the country’s places there are cities which consistently prototype new things, systems, and ways of life and those cities that deploy post-prototype “products.” You’ll have to excuse the brutishness of this line of reasoning, but suffice it to say there are places which tend to prototype new ideas and others which tend to adopt pre-tested ideas from other places. New York City: prototyping engine. Paso Robles, CA: consumption engine.
This came into striking clarity for me as I joined some dear old friends amongst a group of happy Paso Robles residents at a finish line party for the 5th Stage of the Amgen Tour of California. For a few hours the streets of this small town were alive with people – excited people. Jumbotrons and bleachers were erected along the route, television helicopters buzzed overhead, some even awkwardly donned VIP badges. These various control structures all hailed from somewhere else, though: the route fencing was trucked in from Boulder, CO; the helicopter up from LA; the Jumbotron from whoknowswhere.
While Amgen was clearly an economic and cultural triumph for the town, it came pre-tested, deployable, and was temporary. The problem with the prototype/product model of cities is that those places which tend more towards consumption than production become the handmaidens of their bigger brothers and sisters, dependent upon distant places to deliver the equipment and expertise needed to put events in to motion.
If the largest cities are able to churn over constant ptototypes it’s because the abundance of density yields disproportionately large opportunities in the form of financing, know how, and other limited resources. The rural, on the other hand, typically has ample supplies of raw material and time. The rural ethos is to assemble what you have in the best way that you can and this kind of improvisation is is what was missing from Paso Robles. As a place that now thinks of itself as a city, Paso Robles looked to other, larger cities for its missing expertise and equipment rather than taking the imperative of the event to test something new. This opportunity for civitas was treated as a chance to consume.
The glimmer of excitement that came from converting the street into a stage – that old but wonderful architectural cliche – disappeared with the crowd as soon as the race was over. Where was the street food? The hoe down? Anything to prolong the civic moment beyond the bracketed few hours of commercially-sponsored airtime would have given Paso Robles a chance to test out its own ideas for how to be a city. Before you may hope to use the city, you must first create it.
Consider these thoughts half baked, but I continue to feel some responsibility to represent (!!!) the non-urban. This sort of elseplace, as it could be called, makes up a large part of the country’s territory and is a fertile land of opportunity should we decide to change the
fundamentals of the american way of life (like, say, SUVs, obesity, McMansions, et al) These places, too distant from urban centers to be suburbs and too developed to be called rural, are what we need to be prototyping.
Without the warm fuzzies of a humanitarian crisis or the imperative of environmental collapse, when the buzzword of “urban” is nowhere to be found and life seems to be pretty OK, how do we escape the apathy of the comfortable? If the rule of thumb is that 80% of interest comes from 20% of sources, how do we motivate ourselves to work on that 80% that is neither upper echelon nor bottom bin?
Short version: I’m moving to Helsinki to work for Sitra where I am largely responsible for a very exciting project. Yay!
It has been a while since I had to do this, but for clarity’s sake everything written below is the opinion of bryan boyer the individual and does not necessarily reflect the opinions or interests of my employer, Sitra.
Unknown but striking participant from Helsinki Design Lab 1968, literally translated as “The Industrial, Environment and Product Design Seminar.” Photo copyright Kristian Runeberg.
Last week in Helsinki I spent a lot of time digging through archival material from the summer of 1968. Ostensibly I was working, but the excitement with which I poured over the photographs and documents would have made it obvious to anyone nearby that this was hardly a chore. The subject of my limited research was an event held on the island of Suomenlinna, a fortress outside Helsinki that hosted Christopher Alexander, Buckminster Fuller, Kaj Frank, Victor Papanek, and other mid century luminaries for a sort of design workshop. Conversing about topics as diverse as national energy policy and the prototyping of a portable reindeer slaughterhouse (seriously), the young Finns who organized this event did so because they felt a crisis brewing in their world: resources were exhibiting their scarcity, social unrest was spreading, and experts were increasingly entrenched in their own circles of conversation. Design, they argued, could be used as a methodology that brings with it a lateral, holistic approach to the visualization and solving of problems.
Sounds familiar, right? World-saving cross-disciplinary discussions have been undergoing a kind of second-coming recently. What struck me was the prescience of the original documents – as I read it was often hard to remember that the words were committed to paper 40 years ago. Forty years and we’re still having the same discussion. To a pessimist this would be depressing lack of progress. An optimist, however, sees the past forty years as the preparing of ground for the next forty. Perhaps now, with all this time that has passed, we’re ready as a society to listen to the nagging voice of the designer. Rather than using the aesthetic judgment of an individual solely to fixate on the development of products and buildings, this is a definition of design as a method of inquiry – a mindset in conjunction with a coterie of tools and techniques that may be applied to the production of concrete objects as readily as the development and analysis of abstract systems.
Acknowledging the many pitfalls of language that come with this territory, we could call this practice “strategic design.” A designer working in this territory would use their ability to visualize in their mind and on paper complex sets of relationships such as those existing in any plan or section. They would use their ability to pursue multiple paths to the same goal the same way any studio worth their salt presents multiple schemes. They would think about the coordination, staging, and relationship of multiple self-interested parties the same way that an architect negotiates between the trades. A designer of this sort would bring to the abstract configuration of political structures, organizations, and events the same sort of pragmatic rigor that they apply to the working drawings of an object going into production (in other words, strategic design is useless without consideration of tactical execution).
Language is indeed a problem in this discussion and it’s about to get worse. My new employer is Sitra, The Finnish Innovation Fund. I can imagine the look that most of you reading this site must have smeared across your face right now. Strategy and Innovation? Yikes!
I am just as skeptical of terms like “strategic, “innovation,” and “design thinking” (4 simple steps!) as you probably are. For me, this distrust comes from seeing these terms used as rubber stamps to up the hourly rate or fluff up a studio project. Making a zany proposal is not innovative and it’s certainly not strategic. Pulling some stats from Wikipedia does not “design thinking” make. If we – as a discipline of designers – are to make use of such terms we must hold ourselves accountable to external judgment while also defending the specialization of our skills. Strategic design faces the dual threats of academic inflation and business deflation. On the one hand, academic environments rarely offer any opportunities for realization (and thus testing of ideas) in a strategic context. On the other, the business world increasingly threatens to gobble up “design” as a stock solution to poor sales and destroy the credibility and effectiveness of any serious design-minded method of inquiry in the process (“Creativity! Zam! $$$ ?!?”).
Trained designers must gain enough credibility that they can reclaim these wasted terms. Credibility comes from results, which requires testing, which requires implementation, which means we have to partner with those who need help solving their own complex problems. Currently design has a very low stakes role in global decision making because we are generally brought into the process once most of the important decisions have already been made. If we really want to change the world becoming involved with decisions at higher levels, with more at stake, is essential. If designers partner with fabricators of various sorts to bring their projects into material reality, we must consider governments and corporations the fabricators of strategic design.
Snapshot from my first visit to Helsinki in 2002 as a tourist
This is exactly why working at Sitra is exciting: as a government-endowed fund that reports to the Finnish Parliament we are accountable to the decision making apparatus of the country. Sitra has both the position and the mandate to think broadly and strategically about how to enhance the “welfare of Finnish society” – and by extension the global community. To be a designer asked to bring my skills to bear on the problems that an organization like this deals with on a daily basis is… well, pretty damn awesome.
My main task, which you will be hearing more about in the near-ish future, is to organize Helsinki Design Lab 2010, an event whose heritage stretches back to the 1968 happening mentioned above. To put it bluntly, it’s my job to make sure that HDL 2010 doesn’t follow the stale model of most design conferences: a bunch of people talking about slides. Luckily for me, there’s a great foundation to build upon.
See you summer of 2010 in Helsinki?