World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 - For Better Cities

A city of happy people, bubbling with joyful creativity, surrounded by everyday design. This is Helsinki, which will serve as the World Design Capital 2012 together with Espoo, Vantaa, Kauniainen, and Lahti.

In our world, design can be old or new. Small or large. Beautiful or controversial. Visible or invisible. Design is often also for the public good. For example, public transport or public health care cannot function without proper planning.

But design is also everyday things. Freely rolling bicycles, cleverly folded menus, easy to hold coffee cups, airplane seats which fold into a sleeping position, informative signs, and buses, trains, and trams that run on schedule despite the weather.

The Design Capital programme contains about 300 events and projects.  Even though there are, of course, dozens of public events and exhibitions, the purpose of a Design Capital is not to be a yearlong design festival. Its purpose is to be a socially significant project, the impact of which will reach far into the future. The goal of all the Design Capital projects, events, and exhibitions is eventually the same: to provide the means for making cities more functional and better places through design. Not only in Finland, but everywhere in the world.