If you are interested in computer based design, art, music, culture and making things better, you really need to check out the city of Helsinki and what will be going on there over the next year as it becomes the World Design Capital.
Being named the World Design Capital is an extremely high level of industry recognition, and this year Helsinki beat out 46 other candidates for the honour, becoming the third World Design Capital after Turin in 2008 and Seoul in 2010.
As the World Design Capital, Helsinki will play host to 12 months of innovative design projects, and essentially use the parameters of the city to showcase what is possible when it comes to using design in the most positive way possible.
Obviously, many of these projects will extend well beyond 2012 and help keep Helsinki at the cutting edge of progressive design and quality-of-life-focused solutions, and will involve everyone from precision engineers to plastic moulding companies.
World Design Capital is an ambitious project of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, and is an attempt to create networking opportunities among design industry players, and come up with design-based solutions to real world, social and economic solutions.
The main thinking behind the project is that design can play a great role in helping to facilitate positive change and improve quality of life, and that it is crucial to find ways for design industry groups and professionals to come together and network, compete and brainstorm, and importantly come up with viable solutions.
At least partially as a result of projects like World Design Capital, governments around the world now have a wider range of more progressive design options available to consider when undertaking their city planning.
As part of the Helsinki celebrations as the World Design Capital, there will be everything from VJ battles to showdowns between 2 and 3 dimensional designers, which will have little choice but to blow your mind.
One of the most exciting elements of the 2012 World Design Capital will be the involvement of cutting edge giants ‘Cut and Paste’, who for the past six years have been holding digital design battles all over the world, combining music and digital art to stunning effect.
If it has been a while since you have been truly inspired or been totally blown away by something, check out Cut and Paste and World Design Capital Helsinki, because this movement may be one that has the power to save the world. Design plays a role in pretty much every single aspect of our lives, so let’s start thinking about how things can be done a little differently, so that life can be better for more people around the world.
The next World Design Capital will be Cape Town in South Africa in 2014, which will no doubt already have designers young and old all over the African continent working extra long hours coming up with something a little extra special to showcase when they get their turn.
World Design Capital is a fantastic modern answer to the question asked of activists for generations: “If you don’t like the way things are, what are you going to do about it?”
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