World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 looking for permanent changes

The functionality of the society can be greatly impacted through design, but the available options have not yet been used sufficiently.

Helsinki’s year as the World Design Capital began in January. This is not a 12-month long art festival, but an extensive civil project, the impact of which is meant to reflect far into the future. The starting point is to create a better, more functional and comfortable city. 

The timing is excellent. Within the next few years to come, the urban structures in the Helsinki region will change at a historical speed. The production of services is ever more demanding. Creative industries have already become the core of industrial policy. Citizens want to participate actively in the development of their living environment.

Design is also in the middle of a transitional period - both as an industry and as a concept. Design is not only about designing objects or art handicrafts anymore, but large-scale utilisation of design and its methods in the society. The essence is responsibility for people.

Every year a city which is seen to use design as a means for its cultural, social, and economic development in an exemplary fashion is selected as the World Design Capital. Previous World Design Capitals have been Seoul in 2010 and Turin in 2008. After Helsinki, the next in line will be Cape Town in 2014.

The World Design Capital is selected by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design Icsid, which also supervises the activities of the year. Some have found the operational model too bureaucratic, but similar models are common in major international projects.

An International Design Foundation has been established for the WDC Helsinki 2012 project. It is not a traditional foundation but a temporary organisation, the task of which is to implement the project in the best possible way in co-operation with the other actors. The financial scope of the WDC Helsinki 2012 comes from the investments of different actors; the Design Foundation budget is only part of it.

The majority of the WDC Helsinki 2012 programme is collected through an open application process. The aim is to provide the residents with a means to have an impact on the development of their living environment.

The public interest in the WDC Helsinki 2012 programme has exceeded our expectations: almost 1,400 proposals were received by the beginning of September 2011, and the great majority of them are excellent.

Acting as the World Design Capital considerably strengthens the international profile of the Helsinki region. Already now, hundreds of reporters from around the world have visited the capital region.

The most central goal for the year 2012 is the strengthening of the social role of design in all of Finland. The goal may seem self-evident in a country often regarded as a forerunner of design. However, the social impacts of design have so far been limited.

One of the key questions of the Finnish society is the functioning of public services. In respect to this, it is amazing how little design has been used to develop them.

The list of things to improve is long. Functional and safe homes are needed for the care of the elderly. Smooth public transport leans on the ease of use of the system. Health care should be planned around the patient experience from the start. If the interface remains lacking, any information system easily becomes a catastrophe.

The significance of design has also strengthened in business. The more global a market a company's products have, the more they benefit from design. An export country like Finland, small in population, needs the competitiveness provided by design.

In public, critical opinions have also been presented about the WDC Helsinki 2012 project. Its goals have been called unimaginative, because design should in any case be widely used in the society. Yes, it should, but it isn't.

The WDC Helsinki 2012 will have to speed up the change. For design professionals as well, the long-term strengthening of the significance of design is probably more important than a single project being implemented precisely in the year 2012.

The actors themselves are primarily responsible for the implementation of the programme projects. This is to ensure that the competence and contacts remain in the field and create activities facilitating design after the year 2012, as well. If that happens, we can be satisfied.