‘Designing Finnishness’

An opening essay for the book ‘Out of the Blue: The Essence and Ambition of Finnish Design’ (Gestalten, 2014)

Towards the end of 2013, my friend Marko Ahtisaari kindly asked me to write an essay on Finnish design. This was a little daunting, as it was a) for Marko, who I respect greatly, b) about Finnish design, which I can really only claim a kind of foreigner’s passing understanding of, and c) to open a major book about the same, produced by Nokia and published by Gestalten (‘Out of the Blue: The Essence and Ambition of Finnish Design’, edited by Marko Ahtisaari and Laura Housely, Gestalten 2014)

Moreover, although Marko had been working on the book for a while, its final stages of development would end up coinciding with the sale of Nokia’s devices and services division to Microsoft. So the book would also be destined to serve as a kind of informal footnote to a defining modern era — the first wave of mainstream mobile phones, led by Nokia, which has left a mark on pretty much all of us.

So it was not an easy essay to write. But it did give me a chance to draw together the few other things I’ve written about Helsinki, and Finland, and stitch their fragments together into something a little broader, more ambitious. It also gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own time…