Beyond Scandinavian Functionalism
The Northern European design tradition carries a double legacy. The mid-twentieth-century Scandinavian pioneers – Wegner, Børge Mogensen, Poul Kjærholm, Arne Jacobsen – drove a genuine revolution: beautiful, functional objects made available to the many. That project changed what design thought it was for. But what was radical is now conventional. The aesthetic vocabulary of that era has become the default register of good taste – its forms reproduced endlessly, its prices rising, its original democratic ambition quietly forgotten. Meanwhile, the Nordic societies that produced it have become genuinely multicultural, and the global flow of images and ideas through social media and the internet has made non-Eurocentric design traditions more visible and more influential than at any previous moment.
This panel asks how the design world responds to that shift – not by abandoning a tradition, but by genuinely expanding it. What does respectful cross-cultural influence look like in practice? And what is the difference between exchange and extraction?
Live Panel Talk: Friday 12th of June, 1:00 – 2:00 PM