Johan Huldt, co-founder of Innovator Design.
Photo by Magnus Anesund.

About

Design For Everybody Everywhere

Twenty years ago Innovator started to take out their variations of Swedish Modern into the rest of the world. A design concept that that added to the old watchword “Beuty for all” – “No extra charge!”. Today their furniture is produced in three continents ans sold in 30 countries. Furniture that is ingenious, multi-purpose and just as good to both ecological and domestical envioronment as ever. Johan Huldt talks about, present and future ways of working internationally.

Sweden, too, had its revolution – in 1968. That was the year the world's intellectuals tried to explode the structures of Establishment with their demand for global solidarity right across the political, social, and economical boards.

Stockholm's National College of Art, Craft and Design naturally took a lively part in the uprising. There, for a long time ahead this protest movement put the actual tuition somewhere in the middle, between teachers and pupils. The sensitive pedagogy of the esthetic disciplines could not resist such a massive attack, and the practical skills of handicraft and design were regarded as serving only to provide the commercial market with more products with which to "make a profit".

"We are suffering from that gap in knowledge today", says Johan Huldt, who graduated in furniture and interior design in 1968. There was a denial of knowledge built in to this dogmatic non-acceptance of established skills.

But those who graduated in 1968 had already gone throug the "old school", where students did not call their teachers by their first names, and where it was not taken for granted that one would have to plod through techniques and basic skills – a place where it was natural to consider Swedish design as among the best in the world, and skilled and inventive Swedish designers did not need to be told to take advantage of the opportunities round about them

At the same time, this period of study coincided with what can be called the "accomplishment" of functionalist equality". Actually, it was not until the 60s, with their financial upswing and full employment, that equality broke through on a broad front in Sweden – with the culmination of optimism and total demands for freedom.

For the young people, the new freedom meant a new way of giving meaning to life, both the inner life and the outer. It was freedom from convention, from traditional thought and behaviour – socially, culturally and sexually. In the world of design: freedom to create things and expressions to represent this new, youthful lifestyle.

Now came furniture for casual togetherness, clothes for bodies without corsets, enthusiastic fabric patterns for all ages, utilitarian objects that did not fit into any category. The younger generation created a complete new culture: objects that were the opposite of those of the elder generation. Vital colorful, open and available to all – rather than careful, sober, static and class-conscious.

Design was for everybody, and naturally, it must not be expensive. Instead of providing formal, decorative furniture on a ten year payment plan, the new designers wanted to make lightweight, versatile, mass-produced furniture inn large series which could nevertheless be combined in a personal way. And at such prices that buying the wrong thing would not entail financial disaster.

To be continued.