Happy by Design
Crashed Smurf glass sculpture by Paula Pääkkönen, an exhibit in Designing Happiness (image: courtesy of Paula Pääkkönen).
In 2025, Finland retained its crown as the “world’s happiest nation”, topping the UN-backed ‘World Happiness Report’ for the eighth time in a row. “So that had something appealing to it,” begins curator Anniina Koivu, explaining the initial impetus for a new project that is scheduled to open in September 2025. “But I also think,” she continues, “that I have not met any Finnish person who completely believes or trusts in this ranking.” It is, after all, a reasonable doubt: what is happiness and how might it be measured?
The past year has seen Koivu embroiled in this question, which will form the subject of Designing Happiness, an exhibition and symposium created as a centrepiece for the 2025 edition of Helsinki Design Week, opening across Finland’s capital city on 5 September. “Happiness is a paradox,” reads one of the exhibition’s texts. “It is both deeply personal and undeniably collective. And it cannot exist or be truly experienced without its opposite: sorrow, pain or discomfort.” While the nature of happiness may remain obscure, however, other elements of the phenomenon are clearer.
Anniina Koivu, curator of Designing Happiness (image: Piercarlo Quecchia).
Central to Koivu’s exhibition is an interrogation of some of the assumptions that lie behind the ‘World Happiness Report’. “[Rather] than simply asking why Finland has topped the list for eight consecutive years,” the exhibition explains, “we focus on the conditions that enable happiness – and ask whether they can be intentionally and universally designed.” While The World Happiness Report breaks its own interpretation of happiness into no fewer than six subcategories, Koivu has sought to bypass some of this ethical and psychological wrangling by grounding her exhibition in a specific interpretation of its theme – one filtered through the lens of design. “The science of happiness has been going on for centuries,” Koivu explains, “and we now know that what generates happiness in the human body are hormones and neurotransmitters: endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin. Biologically, we know those four generate the “happy” feeling in one way or another, and that they are triggered by external factors which can be reproduced.” What, then, might be ways to design for the triggering of these hormones in the human body?
Designing Happiness provides a study of the manner in which the objects, systems, interactions and spaces that surround us trigger, or otherwise influence, the happiness response. Although genetics and temperament play a key role in shaping each person’s individual experiences, the exhibition explains that “as much as 50 per cent depends on external circumstances and conscious choices – factors we can shape, build and design.” Under discussion, for instance, are considerations such as proximity to nature, natural light, music, meaningful relationships, human touch, trust and generosity, acts of kindness, and physical activity, all of which can be either encouraged or discouraged by the manner in which we organise and structure our environment and social interactions. Across an exhibition space designed by XPO (a collaboration between designers Camille Blin, Anthony Guex and Christian Spiess) and featuring graphics by Robbie Mahoney, Designing Happiness will pull at these disparate threads in a bid to examine the manner in which design decisions may be entangled with human happiness. “If we look at these triggers,” Koivu asks, “could design help to increase our wellbeing through them?”
An open studio organised as part of the 2024 Helsinki Design Week, hosted at Minestrone Workshop (image: Didi NG Wing Yin).
This focus on design as an impactful sociopolitical force is typical of Helsinki Design Week. In 2023, the festival abandoned discrete annual themes in favour of a “triennial theme cycle”, in which consecutive editions of the festival would work together to tell broader stories about design’s impact on the world. “We started with ‘Once upon a time’ (2023), which was about the tools of storytelling and asking the question of whose voices are being heard within design,” explains Anni Korkman, programme director of the festival. “The following year was ‘Underneath’ (2024), because we wanted to talk about process and encourage designers to openly talk about what is happening behind the curtain.” For 2025, to mark the festival’s 20th anniversary, Korkman and her colleagues have selected the theme of “Celebration”, which will conclude this particular theme cycle.
“Celebration” is a theme that the festival has not chosen lightly, with Korkman and her colleagues aware that its positivity presents a framing that might risk working against the more quizzical qualities of its immediate predecessors, as well as the general tenor of current affairs in 2025 – as Koivu’s exhibition might put it, “sorrow, pain or discomfort” are prominent features of the world as it stands. “Obviously, it’s a time of a lot of global horror, which we are aware of,” Korkman explains, “but we also want to talk about the importance of highlighting celebrations and encouraging people to notice things that are worth celebrating. Celebrations can sharpen our awareness of time, and are always moments that we choose to mark – we choose to pause, rather than being stopped by something that comes towards us. A moment of celebration can be an opportunity to look to the future, and reflect on the past.” If past editions of the festival looked at questions of authorship and representation, and the complex realities of the process of design, “Celebration” seems poised to reflect upon the social impact that the discipline has – or might have – upon society. “There is an idea that we are responsible for ourselves to make these moments of celebration and see things that are worth celebrating,” Korkman notes.
Always in for a laugh kite, an exhibit in Designing Happiness designed by Bertjan Pot for Kite Club (image: Studio Bertjan Pot).
In support of this approach, the festival’s content is split into two broad strands. Much of Helsinki Design Week’s programming across the city is generated through an open call (“Which enables a genuine diversity of voices and a clear lens into what's happening right now in the local creative field,” Korkman explains), but these events are anchored by a central venue, this year hosted in the city’s art nouveau Suomitalo building, in which Designing Happiness will serve as the central attraction. “It’s a space that’s like a lighthouse for the festival, so people can come together and celebrate, and maybe get some new ideas and perspectives,” Korkman explains, before adding a reflection by Samuli Saarinen, the designer of the week’s visual identity for 2025. “Samuli said that Helsinki Design Week gives the creative community an opportunity to set its own goals, which are not necessarily commercial or dictated by clients,” she explains. “That is a task that should not just be left to the rat race of the market, which would drain the field of meaning; instead, we want the design field to have the possibility of cultivating its own culture and value system.”
Here, Koivu’s exhibition plays a central role in the festival’s ambition thanks to its focus on the manner in which design may consciously target values and experiences that tend towards the promotion of human happiness. Designing Happiness encompasses exhibits that range across the historical (one wall documents the history of the smiley); the everyday (Antti Nurmesniemi’s vibrant orange seating for the Helsinki Metro, whose colour was selected to “bring a little bit of sunshine into the darkness,” says Koivu); and the surprising. One of Koivu’s favourite exhibits, for instance, is a chainsaw. It is an object unlikely to prompt ideas of happiness in many, yet, as with all design, context is key. Koivu notes the chainsaw’s usefulness for cutting through ice in cold countries, increasing access to cold water swimming, which has documented benefits for health and wellbeing. While the chainsaw itself is not bound up in ideas of happiness with the same intimacy as, for example, the smiley, understanding the manner in which it might be applied to promote human happiness is crucial. Elsewhere in the exhibition, Koivu has chosen to exhibit an Alvar Aalto door handle, prompted by architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s idea that “[the] door handle is the handshake of the building”. Throughout the show, exhibits are intended to emphasise the manner in which design gestures might be imbued with meaning and consideration for the people who interact with them day to day. As Korkman notes of the festival as a whole, the exhibition highlights the manner in which design might be able to cultivate its own ethic of care.
The LM1 laughter synthesiser, created for Designing Happiness by Jacob Kouthoofd Martensson (image: Jacob Kouthoofd Martensson).
As a complement to these objects, Koivu has also approached a collection of contemporary designers to create new work for the exhibition, or else contribute previously unseen pieces that express something of their own relationship to, and understanding of, happiness. Isabel + Helen, for example, have sought to capture a form of happiness that is “simple, honest, and quietly magical”, with an installation that invites visitors to blow on a fan to generate enough energy to light a bulb – an expression of the ease and suddenness with which serotonin can be released in the body. Clara von Zweigbergk, meanwhile, has worked with paper to create a work that plays with ideas of luck and chance in relation to happiness, which Koivu describes as sitting somewhere between “fortune cookies and four leaf clovers”. To von Zweigbergk, “happiness is unpredictable, and can be encouraged by anticipation and hope for what will come.”
This emphasis on unpredictability, however, finds counterparts in two original commissions for the exhibition. Jacob Kouthoofd Martensson has created LM1, a sample-based synthesiser that contains 60 different laughter samples, with up to six voices capable of being played simultaneously to build different constellations of mirth. Inspired by inventor Charles Douglass’ creation of the Laff Box for television sitcoms of the 1950s, a device developed to produce artificial laughter tracks to fill gaps when studio audiences didn’t respond as desired, Kouthoofd Martensson’s synthesiser plays with some of the absurdity, artifice and ambiguity of laughter – a response we instinctively associate with spontaneous joy, but whose origins are often more complex. Graphic designer Frederik Mahler-Andersen, meanwhile, has created a simplified version of the Gallup questionnaire upon which the ‘World Happiness Report’ is based, retaining the original’s focus on self-reported life evaluation, while stripping out the key life factors (such as log GDP per capita and healthy life expectancy) that the report uses to adjust its findings. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to take Mahler-Andersen’s questionnaire, providing opportunities for self-reflection on their own perceived happiness and wellbeing.
Wood Ring seating, designed by Chris Kabel and exhibited as part of Designing Happiness (image: Studio Chris Kabel).
Common across many of the other contributed works, is an emphasis on the happiness that derives through connection: whether with nature, to other beings, or to one’s own work or craft. A contribution from Erwan Bouroullec, for instance, emphasises his “belief that we understand ourselves through work – or the quiet magic of turning nothing into something,” while Konstantin Grcic has donated a Lego sculpture titled Let Go. “With infinite possibilities and countless variables at my fingertips,” Grcic explains, “it gives me happiness to build something so simple and powerful.” To both Bouroullec and Grcic, happiness seems to not only be something that can be designed for, but also an emergent state that results from the act of designing itself – albeit one that is still enabled by the material circumstances which allow for the kind of liberatory practice they describe. Sentiments of this kind, Koivu notes, were evident across the group. “Many of them related to the act of designing and the pleasure of getting into the flow when you forget time and place, and you’re just enjoying what you’re doing. Quite often in the exhibition, we’re referring to the pleasure of simply doing things.”
A photograph from the Pechakucha Night hosted as part of Helsinki Design Week 2024, which will return this year (image: courtesy of Helsinki Design Week).
This might serve as a mantra for Helsinki Design Week as a whole. Across the festival, Korkman and her colleagues have incorporated events that prioritise connections between people, and which encourage access to design more broadly – from the annual Design Diplomacy programme, which opens the doors of ambassadors’ residencies to host international discussions between practitioners; to the PechaKucha Night that emphasises the breadth of the design field, and offers accessible entry points to its surrounding discourse; or even the Designing Happiness symposium, which will take different ideas, interpretations, and perspectives inspired by the exhibition and place them in active dialogue with one another. This emphasis on conversation and connection is also planned to expand beyond the week itself, with the festival’s research surrounding happiness planned to continue as part of Milan Design Week in April 2026.
“We see a lot of meaning in talking about design in an inviting way, and increasing design literacy,” Korkman explains, while Koivu adds that one of the central appeals of having worked on happiness as a curatorial topic is its ambiguity and openness to different perspectives. Of the various reflections on happiness included in the exhibition, she notes, it is down to the visitor to “choose what you believe in, or not even to believe in, but to choose what you feel.” This message of choice, autonomy, and difference is central to the values that Helsinki Design Week hopes to inculcate in its attendees, as well as the vision of design that it aims to propagate through its idea of “Celebration”. “We always think that design can be used to illustrate alternative futures and I hope that that is something people can feel that this year,” Korkman says. “We hope that people leave feeling proud, inspired, perhaps a bit festive, but also carrying this sense of the ways in which things might be different.”
Helsinki Design Week will take place in Helsinki from 5-14 September 2025. Tickets to a selection of the week’s exhibitions and events may be booked here.
This article was made for Helsinki Design Week.