24-h Design Competition of ideas for ‘basement’ businesses of the future

Starting today, the 24-hour Design Competition brings designers and entrepreneurs together to spawn ideas for the next small specialist or ‘basement’ business success stories.

Aim: to create living urban culture

The Design Competition, one of the signature events of Rovaniemi Design Week, is this year part of the joint World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 project of the two cities, aiming to create living urban culture and to further the chances of success for small specialist businesses in Helsinki and Rovaniemi.

Small businesses are today forced to compete with large shopping centres. However, small size can also be a great advantage and an opportunity to create a great, colourful urban culture.  

Encounters of experts from different sectors and cities 

The purpose of the competition is to create networking opportunities for entrepreneurs and designers from the different cities and to form an open and competent working group to further develop the various ideas to boost the operational conditions of urban small businesses.  

The competition team members are top designers and enthusiastic ‘basement’ business owners from both cities.

Design companies based in Helsinki are represented by Diagonal and Rune & Berg Design, and design expertise of Rovaniemi by Advertising Kioski and Treeform. Small businesses taking part in the competition include Töölön Paperi Oy, Punainen Lanka, Liike, Fleuriste and Up with Kallio from Helsinki, and Kunnes Oy, Taito-Lappi, Vesalan luomu- ja lähiruokauppa Oy and Väri Laitinen Oy from Rovaniemi. The teams’ reinforcements are design students from the University of Lapland. 

Design train to the competition

The 24-h Design Competition gets off to a speedy start on the rails.  Four design teams on their way from Helsinki to compete in Rovaniemi start working on their competition entries on the train leaving Helsinki for the Arctic Circle at 13.06.

If you happen to be on the same train, go and sneak a look at the kinds of innovations the teams are working on!