What is for you the specificity of Finnish savoir-faire concerning multimedia and graphism?

In fact Finland has a long history in technological innovation which reflects to multimedia development as well. This has led to a technologically driven society which is unfortunate. However, in defense reaction to this there are interesting things happening at the moment when the most creative people has need to produce meaningful content, more from point of view of telling a story or creating an experience than masturbating with the newest technological dongles.

The visual communication in Finland is, in my opinion, average European level. Perhaps dissolving a bit too much to the general trends there. We should be more confident in using our Finnish roots in design as well. Culturally Finland is quite a unique case in Europe.

What are your influences concerning the aesthetic part of your works?

In the Need project I have played with strong simple graphics influenced by American TV-shops and Japanese information graphics to mention some. Generally I see trends and styles as tools for communication and the debate on originality and imitation is quite naive for me. We sample, we copy, we filter and recycle everything we see. Some do it well by concentrating on the message and some do it quite self-referentially which is usually not interesting.

What is your current activity and your next projects?

“I’m concentrating on my mission to defend quality and meaningfulness in new media business.” I should print that on a T-shirt 🙂 Seriously, I’ll try to have time to still work on Need but I have to concentrate on our company’s assignments and exporting our expertise on international market for a while.

Also I need to catch up what is happening outside my pink Needworld, so I’ll do bit of research (read: spying on you) and I’ll have also an opportunity to visit Japan in late November which is one dream coming true. You can check our stuff from Mindworks.fi, I’ve been involved with most of the projects there.

What is the aim and the interest of an exhibition like the Continent?

It is extremely important that in the middle of a rapidly expanding information society that creative people can show how to use this new technology as a tool. This kind of exhibition and the workshop that took place before it are quite rare forums to experiment without the usual restrictions of “commercial work”, but still aiming at a concrete setup with deadlines and quality controls.