Confusing a shopping center with Invisible Chair.
NO-CHAIR-DESIGN campaign had the pleasure to visit the Jyväskylä Design Weeks in mid Finland. We where invited by the Crafts Museum of Finland to host performances and engage with locals in easygoing talks. Topics ranged from “sustainable design” to “magic tricks”. When confronted with the idea to “not design new chairs” and to repair existing ones, people started talking about their personal crafts backgrounds. A lot of effort was put on understanding how the invisible chair trick works.. As people asked about it this served as a good starting point to start talking about crafts and sustainable design.
– What is it that you are sitting on?
– I’m sitting on a statement. I believe that this is the future. You see we don’t need new chairs in the world.
We had plans to perform on the street but upon arrival a local shopping center staff invited us to do the performance indoors. They picked us up from the street and within an hour of after the invitation we where inside Forum, Jyväskylä and where treated with decent espressos. Weird.. I mean sometimes it’s near impossible to convince estate owners to grant access to do performances or contemporary art stuff on their property. But in Jyväskylä they initiated the collaboration.
I was honest about NO-CHAIR-DESIGN being a non-consumerist campaign focusing on sustainable design.. I mean when designers stop designing chairs people will not consume such products either. We promote repairing and maintenance opposed to consumption and innovation. But the shopping center staff didn’t see this as a dilemma. Either she felt that a shift in society is appearing and in the future shopping centers need to evolve into something which support crafts and sustainable development – Into social hubs.
Or she felt that even as the agenda of our performance was anti-consumerist they would still benefit from it marketing vise. If this is the case I don’t understand marketing as well as I thought.
Anyway it was a good site to work at and an excellent place to make video. We handed out near 250 tutorials educating people “how NOT to design chairs”.
The event was covered by local newspapers. “The mystery has been solved – Check out the incredible video” banners shout on Keskisuomalainen news (text in Finnish) due to the temporary hype the video has had 12000 views. Which is alot concerning that it’s only been online for a day now.
