Design Week – A report from Iceland

Centred on the theme Play, Design March – the Reykjavík design week – transforms the harsh Icelandic winter into a concentration of energy around virtual reality, self-production and recycling.

Design March, image from the festival
No one arriving in Iceland in mid-March would expect a warm welcome but this year’s Design March – the Reykjavík design week launched in 2009 – was hit by two large storms. Locals cannot recall such a harsh winter, which even closed Keflavik airport, in the past 19 years.

This year’s event, centred on the theme Play, began in the Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre which has a larger capacity than any similar space in the whole of Scandinavia.

Built by Denmark’s Henning Larsen Architects in collaboration with the artist Olafur Eliasson, it offers breathtaking views of the waters lapping the capital’s shores, is austere and ash-grey in appearance – matching the stereotype of the local ambience – and is swathed in a light that really cannot be found anywhere else. Its purplish/mauve/pink-dotted facade welcomed the crowd come to listen to the internationally renowned speakers on the first day of talks.

Design March, image from the festival
Design March, image from the festival

Spain’s Martí Guixé, who describes himself in the programme as an ex-designer, opened the day’s work by saying that he sees himself as uncharacteristic in his profession – a designer who is not fond of product design. Belgian architect Julien De Smedt, who has three offices scattered in Copenhagen, Brussels and Shanghai, charmed and entertained the audience with spectacular architectural designs and speaking ironically of his work as he illustrated a table showing JDSAchitects’ latest figures: 289 designs put forward against 26 buildings constructed (an average of approx. 9%).

They do however have several orders in the pipeline, including a ski jump – the precedent being archistar Zaha Hadid’s design for Bergisel, Austria. Anthony Dunne introduced the designs developed with his work/life partner (Fiona Raby – they met at college and have been together ever since). They recently announced that they were stepping down from the RCA in London and theirs is a world of very little tangible design in the most traditional sense of the word but with a strong experiential and educational focus driven by unusual and fascinating intellectual speculation. “It is wonderful working with young people and students because they are the future,” he explained. Next came Playing Like Professionals focusing on interface design such as the creation of parallel and fictitious realities as in videogames.

Design March, image from the festival
Design March, image from the festival

In this context of interactive graphics composed of virtual truths and alternative universes, an outstanding testimony was provided by Nils Winberg (interaction designer for Gagarin) who discussed more than credible artificial visuals. Is there just one reality? Everyone has their own opinion since we create our own as soon as we start moving. There was talk of imaginary worlds and synthetic creativity thanks to the application of sophisticated technology and development of android machines, and on to the presentation of a video on paedophilia, sponsored by the United Nations, describing the method successfully employed to identify more than 1,000 paedophiles worldwide who were exploiting child prostitution in the Philippines, seated in front of their computer screens and without having to purchase a plane ticket – making it uncontrollable and accessible.

The protagonist in the video is called SWEETIE and is a little girl-robot created digitally to spare children made of flesh and blood.

Design March, image from the festival
Design March, image from the festival

Throughout the year, Reykjavík is literally full of self-produced design, an important area for a country such as Iceland which has no design faculty, meaning people frequently go abroad to study. Icelanders have a sense of isolation and this is perhaps why 95% of houses have an Internet connection. Despite being a small population, they are quite international maybe because Reykjavík is en route to New York and Asia - Icelandair promotes stopovers successfully. One of the main hurdles for local designers is transforming a prototype, the production of which is already overpriced, into an industrial product. Anthony Bacigalupo is doing an excellent job with his Reykjavicktrading experience of self-production and self-distribution. “Our country has no raw materials,” explains Katrin Olina, one of its internationally best-known designers who trained in Paris and gained experience in London and Hong Kong. She is currently busy on an art residency in Helsinki. “We have no companies that can produce here; industrial design really is a world still to be explored and developed in Iceland.”

Olina presents a series of small furnishing objects inspired by local folklore which features several horse-related legends. Reading Horse, Olina’s project, was born out of collaboration with the Studlaberg metal workshop in the northern region of Skagafjordur and is for all those who love reading – Icelanders are great lovers of literature and devour books; approximately 10% of the population publishes at least one work during their lifetime. Icelandic bookworms are called “reading horses”, a reference to the wild Icelandic horse breed imported by inhabitants in the 9th and 10th centuries (Skagafjordur is the realm of this breed), and these objects were born “out of a mix of passion for reading and this extraordinary animal; “two key symbols in our country’s culture,” she adds. These objects should be kept near the sofa, to celebrate the art of self-devotion: a mini-bookshelf (for just a few good books) with solid-wood feet with variants that include a reading lamp or a small book-rest.

Design March, image from the festival
Design March, image from the festival

Olina is the granddaughter of Theódóra Thoroddsen, a political activist who, in the second half of the last century, was party with her husband to the independence of Iceland from Denmark (1946) and is keen to stress that the origins of this country (once a fishing island) are profoundly rooted in its people. They say that Icelanders have a strange sense of humour and this is the thought behind a joint project entitled 1+1+1 Surprise! by Swedish designer Petra Lilja, Icelander Hugdetta and Finn Aalto Aalto. The trio decided to take a specific object type, in this case the lamp, as the only design brief from which to jointly develop a new product.  

The three designers worked separately, independently. Not until the morning of 12 March, when the exhibition opened, did they unveil their ideas to each other. By coincidence, all three presented a new product based on the concept of recycling: Petra Lilja had recently worked with a company producing besom brooms and proposed a lamp with a broomcorn shade, a metal stem and a wooden base. The other designers employed parts “recycled from other projects or left in their studios, for some reason.” Hugdetta presented an aluminium and fishbone lampshade featuring a moon-like opaqueness and almost tribal decoration, while Aalto Aalto opted for a clean line when assembling all three materials: metal, aluminium and wood. A land such as this could not lack a design inspired by volcanoes and this was expressed in a delightful glass collection in vibrant colours by multidisciplinary collective IIIF (Agla Stefànsdòttir, Sigrùn Halla Unnarsdòttir and Thibaut Allgayer) based in Reykjavík and Copenhagen, produced in collaboration with French blown-glass manufacturer CIAV in Meisenthal. Before ending this overview, we must mention a visit to the Icelandic Museum of Design and Applied Arts in Gardabaer where the “East: Designs from Nowhere” exhibition includes a contribution by Britain’s Max Lamb.

The international design community’s interest in this small but energy-packed festival is rightly growing fast.

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