[Here’s a pair of really fantastic articles by the same guy. The first is a visit to a Finnish nanotech lab that focuses on biomimicry to create miraculous materials from, like, trees…]
We’re here for a conversation between Ikkala, Kokkonen and me, to see if we can sketch out some areas of shared interest, between a scientist and two designers. Ikkala’s team specialise in the self-assembling of material, based on increasingly deep understanding of the nacreous matter in seashells—mother of pearl, in plain English—or the structure of butterfly wings and beetle shells, or cellulose fibres in birch. Ville and I both have experience of different kinds of assembly, from objects to buildings to organisations. The conversation proves to be one of the most pleasurably challenging I’ve had for a while, and I’ll be picking over its remains for some time. This essay is one way of trying to make sense of it all.
[And the second is some thoughts about how the distinctive history of Finnish object design could be brought into the future with those materials. -egg]
Artek’s essential problem is that the entire furniture business is struggling for cultural relevance. Furniture is important for putting things on, yet unlike in the mid-twentieth century, it says less and less about our age. We know that, as architecture theorist Kazys Varnelis puts it, “technology is our modernity” now; inner space, not interiors.