Read Online How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark by Patrick Kingsley - Free Book Online
Authors: Patrick Kingsley
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everything, from toilet paper to uniforms to parking lots and water glasses. The posters said: ‘only for medical staff’; ‘only for surgical staff’. We did it as a stunt. To make them look at their culture and realise that this hospital apartheid is not good for anyone.”
Other ideas were more practical. Hatch and Bloom suggested that rather than splitting the care of a complex patient between different departments, they should be placed in a special ward devoted to complex treatment, where specific doctors and nurses should coordinate all aspects of their recovery. Ideas-based consultancy like this is often mocked, but in this case, it had results: treatment times for complex patients (now called cross-patients after another Hatch and Bloom suggestion) is down by a fifth. Though they barely work with physical objects, Fruensgaard Øe thinks his firm is among the worthiest inheritors of the Danish design tradition. “Fifty years ago, these chairs changed something. But we can’t do that again. We’ve had our share of chairs now. We’ve had our share of furniture. What we’re doing – the immaterial, service part – is what, when people look back in 50, 70 years, will be talked about.”
Whether this is true remains to be seen, but it’s certainly the way things are going at the moment. Traditionally,Denmark’s top design school has been at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen – but the one most people are talking about these days is in a small provincial town in Jutland. With no furniture department and a focus on industrial and interactive design, you could argue the rise of Kolding Design school mirrors that of Denmark. Even ten years ago, Kolding was still very focussed on what things looked like.
“Aesthetics, aesthetics, aesthetics,” says the eccentric Barnabas Wetton, an expat Brit, a former BBC reporter, and now a director of studies in interaction design at Kolding. “Aesthetics. We were very good at aesthetics. All around us, society was changing so rapidly – yet I could only see students who could make nice things, but weren’t very effective.” In 2003, the school made its first trip to China – and it was there that he says they realised “that people became better and fuller and happier designers when they understood they were working for others and not just for themselves, and that they were able to provide real value to society.”
It sparked a sea change at Kolding, and a decade later they have an international reputation for interaction design. Their approach is not exactly unique, but it is more successful than many. According to Wetton, the school and its affiliates have exhibited six times at New York’s Museum of Modern Art – more than any other education institution in Europe.
At Kolding, design is now taught “as a social practice; design as a way of organising the way that we act insocieties.” One of his PhD students, Eva Knutz, is analysing how to use computer games to get hospitalised children to express their feelings – emotional design, she calls it – while another unionised the Danish modelling industry.
These projects may sound slightly vague, or at least very removed from conventional perceptions of design. But Wetton’s is the most convincing explanation I’ve heard of how traditional Danish design ideals can be applied to the modern world.
“We have a serious problem in Europe and in the Western world. We have to reorganise our societies for the post-industrial age and for the green age. This means we have to take our societies apart and rebuild them and remake them into something else.”
Kolding wants to be at the forefront of this reorganisation. To do this, the school has had to rethink exactly which practical skills it should teach its students. Their work is now as much about researching how people behave as it is about making things for them, and so the course has been restructured accordingly.
“There’s a whole series of techniques our
Other ideas were more practical. Hatch and Bloom suggested that rather than splitting the care of a complex patient between different departments, they should be placed in a special ward devoted to complex treatment, where specific doctors and nurses should coordinate all aspects of their recovery. Ideas-based consultancy like this is often mocked, but in this case, it had results: treatment times for complex patients (now called cross-patients after another Hatch and Bloom suggestion) is down by a fifth. Though they barely work with physical objects, Fruensgaard Øe thinks his firm is among the worthiest inheritors of the Danish design tradition. “Fifty years ago, these chairs changed something. But we can’t do that again. We’ve had our share of chairs now. We’ve had our share of furniture. What we’re doing – the immaterial, service part – is what, when people look back in 50, 70 years, will be talked about.”
Whether this is true remains to be seen, but it’s certainly the way things are going at the moment. Traditionally,Denmark’s top design school has been at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen – but the one most people are talking about these days is in a small provincial town in Jutland. With no furniture department and a focus on industrial and interactive design, you could argue the rise of Kolding Design school mirrors that of Denmark. Even ten years ago, Kolding was still very focussed on what things looked like.
“Aesthetics, aesthetics, aesthetics,” says the eccentric Barnabas Wetton, an expat Brit, a former BBC reporter, and now a director of studies in interaction design at Kolding. “Aesthetics. We were very good at aesthetics. All around us, society was changing so rapidly – yet I could only see students who could make nice things, but weren’t very effective.” In 2003, the school made its first trip to China – and it was there that he says they realised “that people became better and fuller and happier designers when they understood they were working for others and not just for themselves, and that they were able to provide real value to society.”
It sparked a sea change at Kolding, and a decade later they have an international reputation for interaction design. Their approach is not exactly unique, but it is more successful than many. According to Wetton, the school and its affiliates have exhibited six times at New York’s Museum of Modern Art – more than any other education institution in Europe.
At Kolding, design is now taught “as a social practice; design as a way of organising the way that we act insocieties.” One of his PhD students, Eva Knutz, is analysing how to use computer games to get hospitalised children to express their feelings – emotional design, she calls it – while another unionised the Danish modelling industry.
These projects may sound slightly vague, or at least very removed from conventional perceptions of design. But Wetton’s is the most convincing explanation I’ve heard of how traditional Danish design ideals can be applied to the modern world.
“We have a serious problem in Europe and in the Western world. We have to reorganise our societies for the post-industrial age and for the green age. This means we have to take our societies apart and rebuild them and remake them into something else.”
Kolding wants to be at the forefront of this reorganisation. To do this, the school has had to rethink exactly which practical skills it should teach its students. Their work is now as much about researching how people behave as it is about making things for them, and so the course has been restructured accordingly.
“There’s a whole series of techniques our
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