Anyone who questions the power of good design should consider the story of Finland, a small country that literally designed itself into existence and continues to survive through innovation.
Once a duchy of Russia not far from St. Petersburg, Finland celebrated the talents of its best craftsmen and designers to build a national identity, both before and after snatching independence during the Russian Revolution in 1917. Finland is not a Scandinavian country, but most Americans think it is. That’s because of strategems such as the influential exhibit “Design in Scandinavia,” which spent much of the 1950s touring U.S. cities, displaying Finnish goods alongside those of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
Isolated by geography and a unique mother tongue so difficult it can be learned only at a mother’s knee, then forced into Cold War neutrality by the growling Russian bear next door, this new country of only 5 million people needed good public relations to survive. So it used modern design to present itself as a sophisticated Western country that just happened to be in a tough Eastern European neighborhood. It worked.
Today, everyone in Finland seems to be middle-class. (It’s hard to be rich when income tax is more than 50 percent, and hard to be poor when the state provides universal higher education and health care.)
Finnish design reflects this. Instead of being aimed at a wealthy few, it’s a mass culture of quality. Finns always have enjoyed a well-balanced ax that stays sharp more than a priceless painting hanging in a museum. Tour the Art and Design Museum here and you will find everyday objects such as light switches on display. Tour the country, and you will be delighted constantly by little design surprises, such as lockers that return your coin so you can re-open and re-lock them.
World catches on
Now the rest of the world has caught on that there can be fun in functionalism, and that even inexpensive objects can have good design. Industrial countries are adopting the once-maverick characteristics of Finnish design: simplicity, sturdiness, innovative materials and functional design applied to everyday objects from dishwashing brushes to scissors. Forget trendiness. Finnish designs stay in production for decades.
Ironically, many of the products produced for the Finnish “everyman” become expensive status symbols when shipped abroad. Alvar Aalto’s three-legged stools start at $140 at FinnStyle in Minneapolis, which offers many Finnish home-design classics. Marimekko’s exuberantly colored printed cotton costs about $20 a yard in Helsinki but roughly twice that in the United States.
Introduced to America in 1959 by Boston architect Ben Thompson’s iconic Design Research store in Harvard Square, the bold Marimekko prints enjoyed immense popularity after First Lady Jackie Kennedy, young, pregnant, and glowing, wore a Marimekko dress on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 1960.
Marimekko later went out of style, and almost went out of business in the 1980s.
With today’s vogue for retro-1970s design, the company’s colorful sheets, tablecloths and wall hangings are making a comeback. “Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture,” America’s first major exhibit on the company, runs to Feb 15 at the Bard Graduate Center, 18 W. 86th St., New York.
Other Finnish home-design companies include Iittala, founded in 1881 as a glassworks but now the umbrella company for Arabia, Finland’s largest porcelain factory, and Hackman, the 200-year-old producer of tableware.
Fiskars is the world’s largest manufacturer of garden tools, with innovations such as its two-part PowerGears in pruners and new materials such as Nyglass, nylon reinforced with fiberglass.
“We have to create new ideas that we can patent,” said design chief Olavi Linden at Fiskars’ new headquarters in Billnas, Finland, “or our products will be copied and produced more cheaply.”
In the 1960s, Finnish designers tried to maintain their artistic edge at a lower cost with plastics and other cheaper materials. High oil prices and a strong ecological movement has returned them to the natural materials for which they are known. They continue to explore new techniques, however. For instance, paper yarn is being used for rugs, handbags and wall coverings, and recently was featured in a textile retrospective of Ritva Puotila’s landscape-inspired rugs at the Art and Design Museum in Helsinki.
Happy partnership
Finland was early at marrying technology with design. The Nokia company took the black and clunky mobile phone and transformed it into a colorful fashion statement with changeable faceplates. In the process, it became Finland’s largest employer, with $31 billion in annual sales last year, according to Nokia spokesman Steven Kanuff, almost equal to the 35.8 billion Euro national budget of the Finnish government.
Nokia and other high-tech companies now work closely with the country’s 20 free universities and are partnering with the world’s first fully networked interactive community here. Dubbed “Art and Design City,” its residents will control their homes via smart mobile phones.
Several hundred residents and 200 small companies already have moved into the partially completed community next to Helsinki’s University of Arts and Design. By 2010, this virtual village is expected to contain 10,000 residents and 6,000 students, all willing guinea pigs for rapidly changing technologies.
Today Finland is the most wired country in the world, according to a report this year by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and its people are among the best educated and most technologically proficient. Finland used its creativity to survive the 20th Century. In the global economy of the 21st, it knows it will need just as much creativity to stay in the middle class.
