Helsinki Design Lab

At the Helsinki EGOS conference (noted below) our stream paid a special visit to the Helsinki Design Lab, which was a truly revealing experience. The HDL sits within the company Sitra – the now famous The Finnish Innovation Fund. Our session was hosted by the excellent Bryan Boyer, who offered an articulate insight into both Sitra and HDL’s work, methods and driving values.

See his blog postings on: http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/people/Bryan_Boyer

Sitra began with a massive endowment, and operates largely with the revenues from that fund. This is significant when understanding their work, as they have no ‘clients’ and any contractual relations they enter into are not based on revenue considerations or competition factors. They purposively look for projects (or problems) with no ‘owner’, such as social problems not covered by existing public policy, or global sustainability issues to expansive for any one government or too complex for the existing capabilities of other NGOs. With an operating budget of around £50m a year, they undertake some impressive stuff: see Sitra’s website:
http://www.sitra.fi/en

What interested me personally about their work was their driving concern for Helsinki as a civic, public, urban space. Bryan spoke of their attempt to ‘normativize’ civic entrepreneurship – provide leadership, models, and effective strategy for ordinary citizens who just wanted to contribute to a process of change in their own urban environment. To this end they have developed some strong exemplar methods of working – one genre of which is their approach to strategic design.

Download their new, free, manual on strategic design (useful for any creative approach to general, strategic and project management and enterprise) here:
http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/instudio/

The project reminded me a little of Bruce Mau’s Massive Change, although much more pragmatic, theoretically-informed and concentrated on specific, locale-urban, methods of increasing sustainable development, ‘wicked problems’ and the ‘dark matter’ of public-civic policy application.

Jonathan Vickery : 27 Jul 2012 09:25 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem