Helsinki · 2026
THE ONCOMING OTHER
Helsinki Design Week calls it The Oncoming Other: an invitation to meet what we don't yet know.
I came to Helsinki hungry: for design not merely as object, but as a way to shape a life. For beauty, utility, reuse, ritual, place and the ideas that emerge when we live among them.
For one month Helsinki is home. A home with an open door and an open soul. Immersion over observation. Participation over itinerary. Encounter without expectation.
This is a record of what finds me: people, places, objects, conversations, ideas — and whatever I don't yet know I need.
See you in the field.
FIELD NOTES
Helsinki · August—September 2026
Falling
28 AUG · HELSINKI
Two days. I'm in love.
Not just with a city. Not exactly. With its way of being.
A place that assumes people are capable. Where everyday life is designed with intention. Quality over quantity. Repair over replacement. Stewardship over convenience. Dedication to community and access for all.
There is something unexpectedly profound about being somewhere that assumes you can be trusted, that you and your experience matters and that you, and your life, are worthy of investment
Is this what belonging feels like?
FLAG DAY FOR NATURE
29 AUG · HELSINKI
By the time this jet-lagged American made it out for coffee, Finnish flags were flying everywhere. Residential buildings. Commercial buildings. The whole city had gotten the memo.
Naturally, I needed to know why.
Finnish Nature Day: The nation's flag was flying to celebrate and honor nature.
In celebration, I visited Helsinki's botanical garden, then walked through the woods along the Baltic Sea in Espoo.
What a country chooses to raise its flag for says something about what it considers worthy of collective honor.
Perhaps happiness, like everything else, is a matter of design.
A GYM FOR CREATIVITY
29 AUG · ESPOO
I've never been much of a gym person. Apparently, I just needed a different kind of gym.
On one of my first days in Finland, I made my way out to Espoo for the opening of KAAOS STUDIO, Finland's first gym for creativity.
The premise is wonderfully simple: creativity is a human capability that can be strengthened through practice.
Here, you make things. Experiment. Think with your hands. Try something. Get it wrong.
Mistakes are quite literally part of the workout. Because creativity isn't only how we make things. It's how we figure things out.
Perhaps we should all be training for that.
TRUST IS A TWO-WAY STREET
30 AUG · HELSINKI
You can eat and drink in Helsinki's central library, Oodi.
This probably shouldn't have struck me as remarkable.
It did.
People sit with coffee beside books. They eat lunch. They use tools, studios and shared spaces. There are sewing machines, irons and everything one might need to complete a project.
The underlying assumption seems almost startlingly simple:
We trust you.
We trust you not to spill coffee all over the books. To clean up after yourself. To use shared things with care.
I had come to Oodi partly because I'd heard about the sewing machines. I wanted to use one. Then I realized who they were for: residents.
Maybe I could have asked. Maybe someone would have made an exception.
But that felt very American of me.
Entitlement.
The sewing workspace, recording studios and all the rest aren't tourist attractions. They weren't mine to consume, turn into an experience or make into an Instagram post. They're public resources for the people who live here.
I didn't need to see whether I could get in anyway.
So I did the most Finnish thing I could think of.
I quietly and respectfully walked away.
Something wonderful could exist without needing to be for me. And there it was. The other half of something I've been noticing everywhere in Finland.
Trust works because respect travels in the other direction.
A city trusts people with shared things. People respect the things they've been entrusted with.
Perhaps the remarkable thing about Oodi isn't that Helsinki built a library where people can drink coffee and use sewing machines.
It's that they built a society where trusting people to do both seems perfectly ordinary.
