Interviewed by Agnese Čivle, republished from www.arterritory.com.

Sitting at desks and chairs designed by Alvar Aalto, Finish school-children receive an early education in the principles of design, absorbing by osmosis the meaning of such paradigms as “form follows function” and “nature is an endless source of inspiration”. Design is an important part of Finish national identity; it is both their life-style and a self-evident part of daily life. Although Finland's largest city, Helsinki, is one of the world's smallest national capitals (in any case, it is the smallest city to have ever hosted the Olympics), its statistics on the field of design are impressive: in 2009, Helsinki had 789 graphic-, interior- and industrial design companies, with a total annual turn-over of 92 million euros. A quarter of the jobs in Helsinki are in the design industry, which employs 110,000 people.

In 2009, Helsinki was confirmed as the World Design Capital (WDC) for the year 2012. Improving the quality of life – which already is at the foundation of Finish design – was chosen as the project's main goal. In an interview with Arterritory.com, Pekka Timonen – the Executive Director of WDC Helsinki 2012 and Director of the International Design Foundation, elaborated on how Finland, with its considerable experience, hopes to encourage the development of design in other countries.

How did you come up with the main guidelines of WDC Helsinki 2012 – openness, cooperation and the social dimension of design? And could you elaborate on each in more detail?

The term “openness” has already become something of a buzzword – a password – with which various positive things are identified: open cooperation, open communication, open code... Sometimes I'm asked if this word also has a negative connotation – of course it does, but that's for another time...

With openness, we wanted to present the idea of an active city, one that expects its inhabitants to take part in the development of the city. The way to accomplish this is by creating an open system in which creative ideas, business ideas, innovation – basically anything that the inhabitants come up with – have the chance to come to fruition. Since design is an activity oriented towards people, then the capital of design must also be oriented toward people.

The goal of cooperation relates to the network of open cooperation. When organizing WDC Helsinki 2012, we didn't want to use a top-down approach, which is how festivals and art events are usually organized and curated. Our vision was to weave a web that takes into account the city's design ecosystem. Therefore, if we were going to be open to ideas, we had to announce an open call for projects. And we stipulated that only fully-developed program projects could be submitted – no suggestions at just the idea-level. We were quite surprised when we received 1,400 submissions. We only expected about 45 – 100, so a kind of problem situation arose – we had to look through and judge them all. But as a result, 80% of the WDC Helsinki 2012 program is made up of these open-call projects.

The social aspect of design refers to the concept of a design-driven city. We believe that in the future, design will play a central role in the development of cities as a whole – starting with city planning and architecture to industrial- and service design. We want to anchor the role of design in society and in cities; we want to create an urban environment oriented towards people and their needs, which will be not only functional, but also inspiring. Currently, this is not only an urban strategy, but also a regional and national strategy.

Why is it that Finland has achieved such high marks in its understanding of the importance and role of design, while elsewhere in the world, design is spoken about only as an elite and expensive luxury?

First of all, design has been the most notable aspect of Finnish national identity for more than 150 years. It is a Finnish trait.

Second, unlike in many countries, where the roots of design can only be found in expensive luxury goods that came from the aristocracy and royal houses, Finnish design came from “the people”. In Finland, it was the regular people who began to think of high-quality solutions that would make daily life and work easier. And this tradition has been preserved – we have a “design democracy” in which good, functional and accessible things are created.

What would be your advice to Latvia in laying its own road in design development?

First of all, the spread of information is essential. People must be informed about the role of design in society; about how design can improve everybody's personal life.

Second, you have to comprehend that design is a valuable instrument. This is especially important when it comes to the government, to the people who make the decisions.

The third level already deals with the ability to act; that is, utilizing the state of people being informed and comprehending the nature of design. At this level, you have to start creating and using design; and for this to work, you need skilled designers and a whole design ecosystem in which their work will be supported.

It's actually quite simple – it's not rocket science!

Another important thing is to notice the interesting relationships between design and art. This issue always comes to the forefront in discussions, but in refraining from a long and philosophical lecture, I'll state the following idea – a pulsating and rich design environment cannot exist if the art environment isn't already like that. Designers require a creative atmosphere in which designers and artists interact and communicate with one another.

In this sense, design and art are intertwined. Even if the point of art is to raise questions, whereas the job of design is to find answers. Searching for answers is at the center of design; it is a profession and a business. That's why it's necessary to have organizations and a private sector that use design, who need the services of designers.

In your opinion, are all societies ready to accept design in their daily lives? Or is this only a realm for intelligent, educated and developed societies?

Good question. Capetown (South Africa, the next World Design Capital for 2014) is a good example of the fact that a high level of development is not always an indicator. When we speak about design that is oriented towards people, it's not important how undeveloped the country may be, because design can help it rise, and to do so independently of the government.

The idea of Capetown as a capital of design is oriented towards re-unification. In redesigning the structure of the city, the goal is to unify the people, the communities, the city itself... It follows that not only well-developed cities and societies can become stations of good design.

Returning again to Finland, what kind of design is seen as unacceptable here?

Sometimes Finish design is rather serious, but sometimes it is also playful, rich... even too much so. Then it is no longer in the spirit of Finish traditions!

Often times, design can be very exclusive, even expensive, but however unique it may be – don't call it a luxury! In Finland, design is not an indicator of status.

In this context, a critical issue is that of design's sustainability. I hope that discussion on this subject will become more topical and pronounced, because the current understanding of it is lacking. Sustainable design – it's more than just about the choice of material, but there are still designers out there who, naively, think that by using recycled materials, their work can be automatically labeled as sustainable.

The year-long title of World Design Capital was confirmed for Helsinki back in the last months of 2009. How did the last two years of organizing go?

It's been hard work, with a noticeable shortage of time. For such a large project, two years is not enough. But here we are!

Are there any provisions for organizing an event like this, something like a handbook?

The charm in the work of organizing the World Design Capital lies in the fact that there are no provisions – every city can do as it pleases.

Our approach, for example, is very different from that of Seoul's (South Korea, World Design Capital of 2010), whereas Capetown's will be very much like ours.

As Executive Director of the World Design Capital, what is your motto?

“Plan less!” You have to plan a lot anyway, but don't overdo it. You have to give way to events and people that inspire, so that at the end, you can see how some very successful – but unforeseen – aspects worked themselves into the program.

In your opinion, what will be the highlights of the events program, and how should people interested in the World Design Capital phenomenon plan their visit to Helsinki?

The months of May and September will be very active and event-filled periods during WDC Helsinki 2012.

In May, we will unveil the pavilion that will be operating the whole of the summer season, and which will be the main hub of WDC Helsinki 2012. The pavilion will be located in a spot that has been undeveloped until now – between the Finnish Museum of Architecture and the Design Museum. Students from Aalto University have come up with the pavilion's architecture and interior design, and the innovative Finnish forest production company, UPM, will build the unique wooden structure. The pavilion's program has also been created in cooperation with the Finnish Museum of Architecture, the Design Museum and Aalto University.

Several exhibitions will also be opening in May, the most notable being the open-air INDEX: Award 2011 Exhibition, which will be open for viewing from May 1 through June 30. In monetary terms, the INDEX Award is one of the world's largest design prizes. The works of the 60 finalists from 2011 will be put on view in Helsinki's urban environment – displayed in specially-made black, futuristic stands. The philosophy of INDEX is not to award just quality design, but to award works that are socially active and truly improve the lives of people all around the world. The competition gives out five awards in the categories of “Body”, “Home”, “Work”, “Play” and “Community”.

The Masters of Arts (MoA) festival will take place May 12 – 29, which is organized by Aalto University's School of Art, Design and Architecture. MoA will include presentations of graduate dissertations, the Aalto University Showcase, as well as exhibitions that will reveal the world outlook of the newest design-generation.

Helsinki Design Week will take place in September. From September 6 through 16, the event will bring together both local and international designers, with the main goal of keeping the creation of a fertile environment at eye-level, so that designers can gain recognition and establish new international contacts.

A “mini expo” of sorts will take place in Helsinki September 6-16, in which the rough and industrial Suvilahti territory will be given over to Everyday Discoveries – an exhibition of the latest achievements in design. The organizer of the exhibition is the Finnish Design Forum. Leading design organizations from 20 countries will present their latest design concepts that all have the goal of improving the quality of life. The WDC Helsinki 2012 program is made up of several hundred exhibitions and events; to choose the best time and events that match your interests, we recommend that you take a look at the complete program of events on our homepage, wdchelsinki2012.fi/en/programme.

Latvian graphic designer and artist, Martins Ratniks, participated in Spring: Icograda Design Week in Vilnius 2011 with graphic design works created for the festival “Art + Communications”. Photos of Martins Ratniks and his creations were taken in May at Icograda Design Week. Along with the pictures the article “MARTINS RATNIKS and ART + COMMUNICATIONS” written by Anda Boluza at the end of the year 2010 is published.

This autumn in the window cases of the Latvian National Library the graphic design works by Martins Ratniks were exhibited. The author has designed them in the length of twelve years for the festival “Art + Communications” – posters and invitations were exhibited in the specially created and illuminated boxes. The exhibition was organized by the Design Information Center, which organizes the festival “Design. Future” in Latvia since 2005. The festival takes place every year in October and includes a broad programme of events complemented each second year by Riga young designers’ biennial organized by the center. This year the festival highlighted the graphic design showing the works created in Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden and Spain. The festival is a considerable pretext to see and realize also the values created here in Latvia. This year it - as an incentive to reevaluate their archive - was useful to the new media center RIXC. The center was established in 2000, in the formation of which being involved a number of initiatives one of which is a direct nucleus of the center – an electronic art and media center e-lab which in the year 1997 launched the tradition of the new media culture festival “Art + Communications”. In the framework of the festival focusing on international and interdisciplinary projects devoted to the scientific discovery or research of technological achievements and artistic interpretation, RIXC has become known as a platform of authors’ communication and cooperation far beyond the borders of this small country. The artist and graphic designer Martins Ratniks entered the organizing team of the festival in 1997, establishing and improving over the years the recognizable graphic expression that characterizes RIXC activities.

In 2010, when attending the graphic design biennial in Brno, in the exhibition of which the works of Martins Ratniks were included two years before, I dropped in at Art House of Brno and visited there an exhibition “Planet Eden. Tomorrow’s World in the Period of Socialism in Czechoslovakia. 1948 – 1978.” I was interested to watch what vision the artists had created, tending to visualize the idea of human progress and future achievements – the illustrations of books show the spectator dynamic missiles and space launch bases on the surface of uninhabited planets, and serious and thoughtful astronauts. Focusing on the theme of fantasy, gave the artists the more extensive freedom of expression at the stage of socialistic realism since the reflection of future civilization usually has been related with novelty found outside the generally accepted standards. A similar passion is seen in Martins Ratniks’ graphic design works created at the end of 90-ties, undertaking cooperation with the new media center e-lab. The changes of the graphic design solutions evoked in the world by the computer technology at first are observed, for instance, in the tandem works of designers Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLands when in the middle of 80-ties both of them focused on the search of a new form initiated by computer programs and established an enterprise Emigre for distributing digitally created fonts. Computer technologies were introduced in Latvia slowly and when Martins Ratniks started to work as a designer, for the majority of the inhabitants of the country computer technologies still seemed to be wrapped almost with the twilight zone misty halo. In addition, the festival “Art+Communications” solves themes that even today sometimes seem worthy of the plots of science fiction movies. For instance, in 2003 “the international conference actualizes the theme of “media architecture”, discussing about the mutual interaction of information network and urban geography: how the virtual network experience of social communication, when re-transformed in the physical space, causes new preconditions for expansion of public space in the urban environment; how  the current development of GPS positioning and mapping technologies, mobile communications and wireless networks is changing our concept of time and space, social structures and forms of art.”¹ Looking more carefully at the poster of this conference, small figures - at first unnoticed - may be seen – made of a few square pixels in the culture specific style and are similar to the computer game images – they remind of futuristic robot models. In the poster composition they have been dedicated a very little role, the significance of the main element being assigned to an ascetic stylized drawing, in which the reflected construction seems to be created just for performing physical and chemical experiments in the laboratory. During the first years, the drawings have been created mainly going into the design of computer programme interfaces, later Martins has identified some other visual codes related with technologies. For instance, when designing a poster for the activities of the festival in 2008, he made use of the graphical elements of ISO 12233 standard image – the one used for the determination of optical resolution of devices. Comparing the graphical structures, placed at the center of the poster composition in the years 2000, 2001 and 2003 a gradual simplification of form and the refusal from illustrative details can be observed. Similar changes can be observed in the design of the festival edition Acoustic Space – at the end of 90-ties its pages like a dense cultural layer contain a lot of different visual paraphrases on cyberspace, until the catalog “Energy” issued in 2009, the cover of which indicates the designation of the content “scientific and artistic, utopian and critical ideas”, has to be described as a practical and ascetic collection of information. “I am interested in the way the technologies affect art. I see that the software created by programmers, directly and on global scale is influencing also the graphic design. When in 1998 I made the first edition of Acoustic Space, I had just started to work with a computer and had not seen what and how it was done elsewhere. It was my first touch with a digital environment, my reflections about it. Some years later I discovered that all objects of graphic design at that time in the computer-related subculture were conceptually similar. Then I started to analyse the works I had seen and understood that it was possible due to the tools. It is purely the case of software and computers, a certain computer aesthetics, which emerged from the principle of modernism. Squares and frames, two-dimensional environment in which graphical elements are applied to create the illusion of space.”²

Composition is what makes Martins Ratniks works interesting; it seems to be classic and at the same time – specific since the author has not refused from multiform additional elements, at the same time being able to maintain a uniform and finely balanced expression. I would characterize the composition and rhythm sensible in the works as personal, especially taking into consideration the context of the Latvian graphic design. While in the 70-ties the late modernism influence was reevaluated globally, expanding the creative potential into the expression relevant to punk culture in England or in the kitsch peculiar to postmodernism in America, a poster is topical in Latvia, demonstrating authors’ individual style. The Latvian graphic design history had not experienced time when the strict influence of the international typographic style would be noticeable in the majority of solutions. Works being created in the period of Soviet power in which the outcome of purposeful and deliberate effect is seen, most often should be evaluated as an artistic experiment, not a routine practice, nevertheless the blink is more sensible from the works of constructivists’ intrinsic aesthetics that found expression, for instance, in the ascetic solution of a poster. Posters were realized in a letterpress technique, printing only a text and a few lines for organizing composition on the paper. This radical temperance inherent to modernism which as closely related with a rational use of technical equipment has also been interpreted by Martins Ratniks, conceiving in letterpress technique printed poster for the festival in 1998. He also depicts Gustavs Klucis in a quite illustrative way, creating a two-frame assembly for the poster of 2000 – the Russian constructivist born in Latvia meets the leader of band Prodigy. The local graphic design scene is still little developed since schools lack qualitative higher educational programmes specific to graphic design, though at the same time these conditions foster discovering matters from different point of view – not traditionally pointed but individually found.

“Imagine, a computer – it has been built, it operates as if without deviations, just numbers. However, directly in terms of programming it is impossible to make absolutely accurate computers that work faultlessly. All machines are built taking into account the likelihood of failure in some billionth operation. The same in graphic design – you are making a perfect thing at a high professional level, everything is right, everything is clear, however the things which change something in the total situation which are interesting after some time, always are those in which there is some displacement or error. That is a human factor. Therefore at the beginning I decided to introduce some irregularity in graphic design, to make design as if functional, however, at the same time to envisage some element regarded as a mistake. Deliberate mistake.”³

Paradoxical seems the conclusion that the works of scientific fiction also do not bespeak of future but indirectly characterize the blink when they are created, and thus currently the samples of Martins Ratniks graphic design should be regarded as a bright sign of the end of 90-ties and the beginning of the 21st century.

Martin Ratniks was born in 1975 in Saulkrasti. He has acquired education in Design and Art school of Riga and at the Department of Visual Communication in the Latvian Academy of Art. In 1998 together with his course mates has created the creative production company F5 or Famous Five, which represented Latvia in significant international art shows (in 2005 in Venice Biennial in Italy with a project “The Bulb of Darkness”, in 2002 in Santa Paula Biennial in Brazil with a project “Enjoy the Fine Night!” and in other exhibitions) – not only participated as an artist in the development of the conception of multimedia projects and visual solutions but also made a graphic design of the catalogs. Since 1997 he works in the new media cultural center RIXC  (till 2000 – e-lab), making graphic design for various activities.

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¹ http://www.rixc.lv/03/info_lv.html
² Boluža Anda. Mārtiņa Ratnika dizaina kods. „Dizaina Studija”. Neputns, Riga. 2008., n. 11., p. 38.
³ Ibid.