I come from "The Idiot Factory"

Life in Stockholm is pretty easy to get by for the most part, it is rare that one experiences social tension or feels unsafe in public. However, as I walked through the doors of the Central Train Station several days ago, I felt a weight of unease fall down on me. My reason for being there was to do some fieldwork for one of the courses I am taking, as a part of which my group and I are to propose a new media art/design project for the Central Station. I was going to take a bunch of photos/videos, interview people, and who knows, maybe even do some situationist private detecting if I had enough motivation to. You might think that it was natural for me to feel uneasy being involved in such 'suspicious-looking' activities, in a major public space, with a Turkish passport, in the wake of 9/11 or 7/7 or 11/26, etc. Surprisingly enough, it was not my nationality, but rather the school I attend, that gave me the shivers. Let me explain why.


About three weeks ago, Anna Odell, a 35-year-old student from Konstfack faked to commit suicide by trying to jump off a bridge in Stockholm. Let's tune in to thelocal.se for the rest of the story:

As a part of her final project before graduation, Odell pretended she was going to jump off a bridge to commit suicide. Horrified witnesses called police, who then tried to restrain the kicking and screaming Odell. After arriving at the hospital’s psychiatric ward, Odell proceeded to scream at the medical staff who attempted to help her, even spitting in the faces of several nurses. She was eventually restrained on a gurney and given drugs to calm her down, remaining in the hospital overnight as doctors attempted to diagnose her psychiatric condition.

The whole thing caused a big public outburst with citizens saying that they cannot possibly believe that this is a part of an academically-approved project, which means it is being funded by Swedish taxpayers' money. Views ranged from inquisitions saying why art students cannot just paint nice pictures instead of doing such crazy things to doctors saying that the artist is "welcome to come back so I can give her a shot of Haloperidol, and then we’ll see how much fun she has. That would make a great installation.” All in all, this hot issue evolving around Konstfack was beginning to cool down, just when a second 'incident' took place to set things off once again.

Last week, Sweden's minister of culture Lena Elisabeth Adelsohn Liljeroth visited an exhibition in central Stockholm to witness an artwork that was apparently not her cup of tea. The work was a performance video that showed the artist--in disguise under the nickname 'NUG'--breaking train windows and tagging in the subway. She went on further with her fury to ask the gallery owner for more details about the creator of this work, upon which she was informed that it was another Konstfack student behind 'the heinous act'.

Now, SL, the urban transport authority in Stockholm, claims that travelers and customers feel offended, and asks for a compensation 100000 SEK (approx. 10000 euros) for both the moral and the material damages this act has caused. Dr. Ivar Björkman, president of Konstfack airs on major TV channels to answer questions, and school is visited by reporters. One of the viewer comments on the Dagens Nyheter--a major daily Swedish newspaper--website, calls Konstfack "The Idiot Factory".

Considering the fact that the Konstfack campus is an old telephone factory, the second half of that analogy might not be so irrelevant after all. And my group and me will try to do our best to substantiate the first half of the analogy.

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Reflections after the 2009 Stockholm Furniture Fair

Those of you that are obsessed with furniture fairs, and have missed the Stockholm one that took place recently, can sit back and relax. Call it the crises or a design-bottleneck, what I have seen during my recent visit to the Stockholm Furniture Fair was not so satisfactory. However, a couple of projects I stumbled upon at the fair helped confirm an emerging trend I have been observing in a number of design fields. It is a trend I call by the name "mass-production of design ideas"--artefacts that are executed within a very limited timeframe—where, this very characteristic of the artefact's design process is also being used as a way to promote it.

One example to this trend comes from the Israeli design studio Godspeed, who exhibited at the fair a furniture series by the name "speed-furniture". To describe briefly, the material used to make these pieces is waste wood that had been reclaimed from Tel Aviv carpenters. How this project specifically relates to our trend is that all "speed-furniture" is produced from scratch within a time limit of one hour.

Another example from the fair to what I call "mass-production of design ideas" was a project carried out in University of Gävle's 'Design and Wood Technology Programme'. Here, participants of a ten-day workshop produced unique pieces within this limited timeframe. Similar to Godspeed's case, they had defined material limitations too, using only lycra and birch.


Of course, these two examples do not stand alone to represent the trend we have been discussing. Another example that comes to mind from the field of furniture design is the "100 Chairs in 100 Days" project by Gamper Martino. For the sake of diversity, another example I'd like to give is from a graphic designer named Serifcan Ozcan, who has created a ten-hour portfolio of ten works, by generating a new project each hour-- and, afterwards, ironically sold one of those projects to a client. I would prefer not going into further detail about these since both projects could be studied in detail via the hyperlinks I've provided. I would rather use the rest of this entry to give my own viewpoint on this emerging trend in design.

According to my interpretation this phenomenon has several sides to it. First of all, designers have been realizing, for a good while now, that they are not only designing for mass-production, but also mass-consumption. With the ongoing crises, designers are very well aware of the fact that they have long been operating along the paradigm of the throwaway culture. Therefore this approach to design might as well be their reaction to this very paradigm.

A more cynical view might suggest that an increasing number of designers are aware of the prestige that is attached to the 'designed' object. They might as well be exploiting this opportunity, much like star designers have in the past two decades, though this time in an underground fashion, with a 'designed sloppiness' approach.

A view based on the labor and economics side of things, which is not very far away from what we have discussed in the above paragraphs, could provide another interpretation. As manufacturing processes become more automatized and globalization of capital is on the rise, the traditional definitions of blue- and white-collar labor are going through a major shift. The flexible markets and the conditions brought up by globalization are pushing forward for a shift in the division and distribution of white-collar jobs. Today businesses talk about the outsourcing of consultancy work, such as design—just like they were starting to talk, a few decades ago, about the outsourcing of manufacturing (blue-collar). Design is increasingly being given as a by-product of the whole consultancy package provided by companies. This is especially evident in the services offered by competent businesses from developing countries.

The examples we have discussed above, might be considered as one type of reaction to these recent phenomena. Can there be another way to react? Ronald Jones suggests the "experience design approach" as another way, where designers develop their skills in an interdisciplinary manner, and move away from an object-oriented practice towards one that focuses on creating intangible commodities. In his article "Are You Experienced?" he provides more insight to this :

its [experience design as a 'business art'] emergence will quicken as China and India begin acting on the obvious, giving design away for free because their economic advantage is with mass-manufacturing, not designing prototypes for mobile phones. China and India’s efficiency at mass-producing physical commodities frees up small but growing sectors of the Western design community to create and distribute intangible commodities, including experiences.

In the wake of these recent phenomena, what is your take on the future? Will we see a furniture fair where exhibited pieces are being designed and executed in real-time? How about an 'experience fair' of "intangible commodities"?

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Verbal Functionality

All of us designers are probably familiar with the importance given to functionality by Scandinavian Design in general. After spending a couple of months in Stockholm, I now know that, for Swedes, functionality is much more than just an important element of design. It is, rather, a lifestyle. How I've come to understand this is due to a pattern I've been realizing: The Swedish way of naming places. Let me exemplify my point, by using comparisons here and there:


-What are the names of most popular art & design schools in London? Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths, etc.
-What is the name of the art & design school I go to in Stockholm? “Konstfack”. [Art (Konst) Faculty (fack)]. Simple as that. The neighborhood where Konstfack is located now was previously a production site for Ericsson. So guess what it is called: Telefonplan. ("Telefon" means telephone, and "plan" means square) More examples come from streetnames surrounding this place: Microphoneway, Telephoneway.

-What are some of the most famous cultural centers in London called? Royal Albert Hall, Barbican Arts Center, etc.
-Stockholm’s biggest cultural center is named Kulturhuset. [Culture (Kultur) House (huset)].

-How do we call London's hub of transport? King's cross, Liverpool Street, etc.
-Stockholm’s hub of transport is named T-centralen, T standing for Tunnelbana, which means "the tube". The most central train station is called Centralstation.

-The most central square in London? Picadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, etc.
-Guess how they call the central square in Stockholm: Centralplan ("plan" meaning square)

-Sweden's famous menswear brand is named DressMann. The newspaper vendor you can find in all stations in Stockholm is called "Pressbyrån" ("byrån" meaning bureau/office), etc., etc...

So what do all these add up to? A total stranger who speaks Swedish at beginners' level can, very easily, find his/her way around the city, the moment he/she sets foot in there. In the Swedish capital there are almost no places named after dynasties, wars, important historical dates, figures, events, etc. (Or maybe, to avoid exaggeration, I have to admit to having seen an Olof Palme street somewhere in the city).

I can hear you say "What's the relevance of all these to us designers?" Well, we just have to realize that function, form and content do not follow one another, but are rather integral parts of a much bigger picture, and a holistic mindset--often an ideology.

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