Danish design is an old chair

By Sune Aagaard for Copenhagen Exclusive

It was January 5,1995. At the design museum Trapholt in Jutland, a group of people – many of them photographers and journalists – were gathered around Hans Wegner's beautiful Y - or Wishbone - chair from 1949. Not only was it an enormous commercial success, and more so today than ever before, it was also an icon of the golden days of Danish design. As the crowd watched in silence, a lumberjack turned on his chainsaw and started to cut up the chair.

A group of designers from Århus called Spring were behind the happening. And a lot of thought had been put into that dramatic scene. Spring didn't dislike the Wishbone-chair, in fact they probably admired it as much as everybody else. But they felt that the proud traditions of Danish furniture design were counterproductive for a new generation that was trying to create and promote new Danish design. The beautiful chairs, lamps and tables stood solidly in the way of international recognition for younger Danish designers. In a symbolical sense it was necessary to cut up the chair, and there was no better way to visualize that process than by actually doing it. Another, perhaps slightly more subtle point was that the design ideals of the 1950s reflected a static world view whose essential components were the nuclear family and the nation. They did not do justice to the multicultural society of today and the dramatically increased diversity in living arrangements.

The happening took place 12 years ago, and since then some will argue that Danish designers have managed to establish themselves outside the heavy shadows of their world-famous predecessors. A new generation of furniture designers, counting people like Louise Campbell, Kasper Salto, Christina Strand and Anders Byriel, have established strong reputations, although their positions cannot compare with Wegner's or Jacobsen's 50 years ago. Similarly, Danish fashion has achieved impressive results and has been recognized worldwide for the quality of the creative work carried out here. But is it fair to conclude, based on these successes that Danish design has managed to cut up that old chair and get it out of the way? Well, hardly. And the major reason is that the truly dramatic developments within the world of design are not taking place within design of furniture and clothes. A wide variety of new disciplines within design, many of them closely related to technology, are developing rapidly. A parallel development is taking place within immaterial design, e.g. design of information processes. And in these areas Danish design and designers have not managed to establish a strong position. We know of exceptions such as for instance IO Interactive, a global success within computer games, but these are few. The tendency is that in the areas where design is developing rapidly, Danes do not have a powerful presence.

It is interesting to note that Danish companies who have recognized that it really pays off to invest in design are among the most successful in Denmark. Companies like Danfoss, Foss Electric, Grundfos, Bang & Olufsen and Coloplast all hold very strong positions in their respective markets partly because of their strong understanding of the importance of design and a profound feeling for the intimate and intricate relations between design and technology. They have learned that they can charge more for their products than their competitors because of their investment in design, and they recognize the position design must have in any visionary and innovative product development process. These companies are not typical, however. In fact, if you wanted to be polemical you could argue that you could take design out of the Danish GDP, and no one would notice. The furniture designers have contributed immeasurably to the Danish brand and have in some cases been very impressive commercial successes, and today we have nothing to rival the position Denmark once held in the ever-broadening field called design.

One can only speculate about what the visionary furniture designers of the ‘40sand ‘50s would have been doing today. Part of the reason behind their success was that they were cutting-edge when it came to understanding the potential and limitation of the materials they were working with. They developed new methods for shaping wood and making it do wonderful things that had been unimaginable only a few years earlier. If they had been young designers today, what would they have been doing? Most likely they would have been involved in technology design. Their desire to take what was known one step further would have probably led them to take part in mapping the unknown. They would likely work on developing new categories of products, segment busters, or at least applying their skills to the recent technological innovations of others. A method that the Danes have applied successfully for centuries, which has led to a heated debate in recent years on whether Danes should participate in pure research on any substantial level at all or simply apply the new discoveries of others.
The point here is not that Danish design is suffering from a major crisis. The growth rate is twice the level of the rest of the economy, and the turnover has reached six billion euros. The design business is facing at least one major challenge: Almost all new design companies are very small and remain so. 95 percent of all new companies consist of only one person, and less than one percent has more than 10 employees. This means that it is difficult for the companies to grow and become international as well as to attract the attention of major buyers from all over the world. It is a widely held belief that a few more of such companies would have a strong influence on the entire business, because they could function as catalysts bringing many of the smaller companies with them to the next level.

Once upon a time Scandinavian design or even "Scandinavian cool" was easy to recognize all over the world. If you found an object with a clarity in the artistic idiom and a user-friendly approach to functionality, perhaps not too colourful, but radiating quality, often also in the price tag, it was probably Scandinavian. But as David Fellah, CEO of Danish design company DesignIT (probably the biggest one of its kind in Denmark), recently remarked in the Danish daily Politiken, "A perfect example of Danish design is the iPod from Apple. It has a logical aesthetic, it is functionally well thought out and executed – and it is 100 percent American."
Which is why Danish design is struggling to reposition itself, although not necessarily through cutting up chairs. There are different strategies for accomplishing this repositioning, but everybody understands that a strong position in technology design will often come about as a consequence of outstanding individual talents rather than as a result of a political process. Just like Finland has a unique position within technology design for historical reasons dating back at least 50 years, and as a consequence of a strong dependency on the Soviet market, which dominated Finnish exports, there are specific reasons, historical, cultural and political, as to why Danish design is still primarily associated with furniture. And some argue that the only sound business strategy would be to hold on to that point of difference and all the free branding that comes along with it. And yet history tells us that sooner or later those unique talents come along and change everything. There is no specific reason why the next technological segment buster should not be Danish. Think of Skype. A company founded on a technology which had been known for 10 years and turned in to a business worth more than the globally known Danish brewery Carlsberg in just two and a half years because of the application of a user-friendly interface. That is one of the fascinating things about design, and today more so than ever before. If the idea is right, the sky is the limit.

This article from the magazine Copenhagen Exclusive