Ulla Engeström

Thinglink seminar at USC School of Cinematic Arts

Thanks to Scott Fisher, I had the pleasure of visiting the Interactive Media Division at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, where I gave a presentation on the originating idea of Thinglink, the invisible tail, and demoed the new site.

Here's the abstract of the talk:

 "This presentation explores how tagging physical objects with personal stories can make them work as agents of social networking on the Internet. Thinglink is a free product code and an online catalog of design products that enables design enthusiasts to share photos and personal references of products with their friends. These photos and references link back to the catalog forming a dialogue between designers, manufacturers and their products in the various real life settings. The presentation includes practical examples of creating ID stickers for artifacts and claiming a product in the Thinglink database."

With alumni like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, USC is one of the most prestigious film schools around. Scott has put their powerful financial backing to work and created some amazing things: for instance, the seminar room walls were projection surfaces. When turned on it was as if the entire room had been wrapped around with one continuous giant screen where students juxtaposed my presentation with a live chat backchannel and relevant snippets from the web.

I really enjoyed the lively discussion afterwards. Thank you so much everyone who contributed!

Smoking is not cool, you skunks!

One of my favorite designers Tiia Vanhatapio is launching a new anti-smoking collection for the teenage clothing brand Vero Moda in the end of April. The clear message of the SKUNK GIRL collection is: Smoking is not cool!

Renting is the new buying

This column was written for CRAFT09: Crafting green in August 2008.

A good friend of mine recently married a guy who is devoted to minimizing his ecological footprint by consuming as little as possible. She totally appreciates this, no problem, but at the same time she wonders if being green and having little bit of luxury in their life from time to time are mutually exclusive desires?

My colleague Tuuli Sotamaa and I recently asked 100 people to answer a simple question: “what does luxury mean to you?” Instead of associating luxury with money or any imaginable form of wasteful consumption, the majority of the respondents connected luxury with a lifestyle rich with time, space and love. Many said it is luxury to eat food made of healthy and tasty ingredients, spend time in nature, enjoy beautiful interiors, and have time for personal development. Doesn’t sound too wasteful, does it?

Some years ago Ikea constructed an ad campaign around the spitting image of a haute-couture designer who boycotted Ikea for selling design furniture at prices regular people could afford. An example would be the Ikea Frosta chair ($12.99), a copy of Alvar Aalto’s classic Stool 60E ($255.00). Ikea’s copy is cheaper because it is mass-produced in China using low-cost materials.

Harvard Business School’s innovation theorist Clayton Christensen would call Ikea’s business model disruptive innovation because it is floods the market with the same design at a much cheaper price. Still, business success that relies on cheap labor and cheap materials has time and again been shown to plant the seeds of humanitarian and ecological catastrophe.

We are also not proud of things that have a suspicious past. Cheap things don’t feel like luxury, because luxury is not just a sensual, but also a social experience.

In the recent Sex and the City movie there is a wonderful experience of consuming luxury in a sustainable way. Carrie notices that her assistant-to-be brings a genuine Louis Vuitton handbag to the job interview and asks the young woman (Jennifer Hudson) how she can afford it. Her answer is: “I rented it”. Indeed a breed of new online services, such as borrowbagorsteal.com, froxylady.com, and fashionhire.co.uk offer designer dresses, hats, bags, sunglasses, and jewellery for hire.

We are already used to rent apartments, washing machines, paintings, bikes, laptops, phones, copy machines, badminton rackets, power tools, and even pets for short periods of time. But perhaps we should think about renting and borrowing on a broader scale, as a real alternative to owning.

Apartmentreviews.net has calculated that if we need furniture for less than two years, it’s smarter to rent it. The same should apply to 90% of the things we need daily. Renting can save our money, avoid the hassle of delivery, assembly, and repair, not to mention getting rid of stuff once it’s no longer needed.

The idea of luxury typically infers ownership, but perhaps renting is really the practice that embraces the idea of sustainable luxury. To consume more ecologically, we need a large-scale renting revolution. Renting quality should be the next disruptive innovation that shakes up the market of buying cheap.

Big Returns

This column was written for CRAFT07 in May 2008.

If a crafter or designer takes as their mission to make durable products that resist fast-changing trends, can they succeed in business without having to sell their principles? An episode that addressed this question captured the eyes of the fashion world this spring when Marimekko, the original 1960s 'slow fashion' brand that has become a movement among its followers, entered into a controversial deal with H&M, the ubiquitous mass-producer of disposable clothing that Michelle Lee likened to McDonald's in her book Fashion Victim.

As a full disclosure, I’ve been a loyal Marimekko fan for over a decade. I fell in love with their colorful textiles and the commitment of Armi Ratia, the woman who founded the company, to create elegant and timeless garments that retain their value in spite of fast-changing trends. For me personally, Ratia's mission materialized in two stunning dresses my mother wore in the 60s. These days I get to wear those same dresses as my top summer outfits, and I look forward to  one day passing them on to the next generation. The age-defying dresses stand testimony to the success of Marimekko's slow style, an antithesis to the wasteful seasonal fashion rally. I even developed a passionate hobby to hunt down and collect all vintage Marimekko dresses I could find. 

When H&M announced that it would be using the classic Marimekko prints and models as a source of inspiration for their 2008 spring and summer collection,  Marimekko's customers predictably cried foul. Why is the McDonald's of fashion suddenly so interested in slow food? Because vintage is hip. In return for letting H&M reinterpret their products and image, Marimekko got its brand name and logo to be the central focus of H&M's global advertising campaign, sweeping over bus stops and billboards from Shanghai to San Francisco like graffiti written in disappearing ink. Former Marimekko CEO Kirsti Paakkanen (she has since stepped down) explained the partnership considerably increases Marimekko’s visibility among the young trend-conscious consumers. As a result, one of the world’s biggest marketing engines is currently promoting everlasting Marimekko as this summer’s trend. 

Not everyone chooses the route Ms. Paakkanen chose for Marimekko. Some years ago I interviewed the founders of ten highly regarded niche design brands for my Master’s thesis. In every single company I interviewed, the growth of the business had flattened when the company had reached a yearly income of 3 million dollars. Surprisingly, the reason for the stalling of growth was not that their wasn't more demand for their products. Instead, the owner-CEOs simply did not want their companies to grow any bigger. They chose to not sell to the masses because they wanted to keep their production local. The didn’t want to have someone with an MBA bossing them around. They wanted to be in charge. They didn’t want to compete on price; they were committed to making the highest quality products. And this, putting quality before profit, had been the way they managed to create the classics that collectors payed top dollar for at auctions and vintage markets. Things whose makers are known for their commitment to quality don’t lose their value. On the contrary, like good wine, their value grows over time.   

It has become a phenomenon of its own that big retailers like H&M hire celebrities like Victor&Rolf, Karl Lagerfield, and Madonna to design special collections. These collections have been very successful, and people of every age are thrilled to dress like movie stars at an affordable price.   But will these mass-manufactured celebrity designer items hold their value? Will a portion of the H&M clientele, the friends of fast fashion, turn into fans of slow fashion? Or will trend-conscious consumers soon think Marimekko is so out of season?

Play with sand

Designers Johanna Lundberg and Jenna Sutela haveworked together with a Flash programmer Timo Koro to create something they call a digital sandbox.  The result is thisissand.com, a website where you can pour/throw colorful sand to build cosmic landscapes, cubist sand paintings or even your own fabric designs. Fun and –as playing with sand always– somehow calming.

Design barcodes from Japan

Barcode Revolution creates designed barcodes for major Japanese brands such as Suntory, Calbee, Wacoal and others.

New BonBonKakku is CafePress for Design Fabrics

Good news to all fabric lovers: Vallila Interior has just launched a CafePress of design fabrics, BonBonKakku (kakku = cake in Finnish). You can submit your own design or vote for ("score") designs by other people. The site is by the coolest agency in Helsinki Kokoro&Moi.

I just submitted my first design, and I'm looking forward to seeing the quality of their prints. The example fabrics suggest they have the capacity to make large colorful ones. But how will they compare with the everlasting quality of classics like Marimekko?

The minimum order is 3 x 1m (á 25e/m) plus tax, so printing all your great designs at once might get a bit dear. Nevertheless, beware friends and relatives: next christmas you'll get lots of soft presents!

A beautiful offer

The yearly Alvar Aalto symposium in Jyväskylä is a kind of a foo camp for design professionals. This August there was especially one presentation I didn’t want to miss: Dai Fujiwara, creative director of Issey Miyake and the creator of a-poc (a piece of cloth) manufacturing concept.

I had booked us hotels and all was set.  Then (oh no!) little Eliel got sick.

Six weeks later at the Valve & Jaiku & Thinglink housewarming party, I met Laura Sarvilinna and Tuuli Sotamaa, who tell me this story: at the same Alvar Aalto symposium that we had missed, Fujiwara had offered to design wedding dresses for a couple who would exchange wedding vows before the end of the year.

Quite extraordinary, I agreed. But even more extraordinary was the fact, Laura exclaimed, that nobody had yet signed up to take the offer! No kidding. But wait a minute, said Laura suddenly,  couldn’t you and Jyri get married?

I instantly thought it was a brilliant idea. Jyri’s birthday was a couple of days ahead and I had not yet thought about his present. Yes, that’s it: I’d propose him. Girls, I said, it’s a deal.

And yes: he said yes. Actually, he said “great idea, let’s do it”.

UPDATE: As a result of this project, my name has changed from Ulla-Maaria Mutanen to Ulla-Maaria Engeström. In the slow world of academic publishing, I'll still keep Ulla-Maaria Mutanen as my artist name.

The Movement for Fun

This column was published in CRAFT:05.

Professor Kevin Henry called me one day from Columbia College in Chicago, where he is Coordinator of the Art and Design Department’s Product Design Program. “Do you think we’re witnessing the rise of a new craft movement?” He asked me curiously. Kevin explained that he had been interviewing crafters on the East coast for a study he was conducting. “Almost none of the crafters I spoke with considered themselves part of a larger movement,” he complained. ”Most of them just craft for fun!”

Surely people who are just having fun do not a movement make? Let’s first turn around and look back at a historical precedent – the Arts and Crafts Movement at the end of the19th century. At a time when industrialization and minimum-quality mass production were booming, a group of artists and designers, William Morris among them, issued a call for the revival of the lost spirit of crafting in design: return to simplicity, to sincerity, to good materials and sound workmanship. Morris’ group never evolved into a social or political organization. Rather, it was a loose community of professional craftsmen who shared the same artistic ideals.

Today the story’s different. First, there is a whole universe of coexisting artistic styles and aesthetic ideals. Second, today’s crafters are more often hobbyists than professionals. They’re also driven by various personal motives.

Take my sister-in-law Kukka, who studies history at the university. She lives on a tight student budget, and perhaps because of that, she crafts a lot of cool stuff. She sews her own skirts and bags, builds clever Christmas presents out of recycled materials, and paints beautiful greeting cards. She saves her pennies and gets more delight by crafting unique creations instead of buying expensive merchandise from the store.   

My journalist friend Liisa is another example. She just loves making cool things and realizing her ideas. Once she made pillows with a wonderful cat design that grew so popular she had to make a whole bunch for her buddies. The other time she crafted necklaces and swapped them for lunch company. She also organizes crafting get-togethers. One Saturday she had us sew outfits for going out that night. For her, crafting is about having fun with friends.

Then there is Stefan who runs a yoga retreat. Following Mahatma Gandhi’s swadeshi philosophy of good life, he hates imported mass-produced products and always tries to find a way to support local makers and entrepreneurs. He thinks that by setting an example to others, he can help make the world a better place. For Stefan, crating is an alternative lifestyle.

The one thing that my sister-in-law, Liisa, and Stefan have in common is the celebration of individual creativity. And that’s the whole point. The emerging new craft movement is not about outspoken leaders or violent controversy. Instead, it’s about regular people following their passion and connecting with their friends.

Still, it’d be a mistake to shrug crafters off as clueless. Below the innocent appearance they are planting the seeds of change. Without making a big deal about boycotting big brands or saving the environment, crafting changes the way we consume. It exposes us to the original ideals of William Morris: the preference of creativity, sincerity, good materials and sound workmanship over wasteful mass-production. It’s just that this time the movement is not limited to a group of professional craftsmen. Instead, it’s spreading much further and broader than Morris could have imagined in his wildest dreams.

Green Touch at DOTT07

Jenna and I built an interactive installation called Green Touch together with the Touch Project of Oslo School of Architecture and Design. We're in Newcastle this week for Designs of the Time 2007 to display the installation at the festival.

The idea of Green Touch is to encourage the DOTT07 exhibition visitors to explore the design objects on display and learn about their production and environmental impact by touching them with NFC-enabled phones.

Green Touch brings the Thinglink interface to mobile devices. We used Nokia 6131 NFC Edition phones running a custom Java midlet. The software enables users to access images and sounds from thinglink.org when they touch an object containing a NFC tag, and provides tactile feedback on the phone.

For the installation, we selected a collection of Finnish design products that carry a unique story - such as the Artek stools designed by Alvar Aalto and Shigeru Ban.

So far the feedback here at DOTT has been enthusiastic. Especially kids seem to instantly grasp and love the idea of mobile phones as "magic wands".