How to Be Danish: A Journey to the Cultural Heart of Denmark

by Kingsley, Patrick

  Most of the Danish Modernists did not just want to make good furniture; they wanted to make good furniture that everyone could enjoy. They aspired to make better homes for the masses – and they could do this only if their furniture was both well-made and affordable. This meant that many of the pieces now sold as expensive classics were, 50 years ago, well within the reach of the average Dane. Today, Jacobsen’s 7 Chair costs around £250. When it was first released, the chair cost ten times less. Hans Wegner’s Children’s Chair is now priced at around £70; once it was a tenner. Wegner was one of several designers who made furniture for FDB, a large chain of cooperative supermarkets. Headed by another Danish Modern icon, Børge Mogensen, FDB’s design department was like a proto-IKEA – except that, unlike the contemporary Swedish firm, the furniture FDB made was not only affordable; it was of an unparalleled quality.

  The Danish Modernists also wanted their furniture to change the way people lived at home. This meant that most were less interested in their furniture as a set-piece, and more concerned with the context in which it was placed and the domestic problems it could help solve. Mogensen spent a decade analysing how Danes used shelves and storage space. He worked out the kinds of objects the average Dane possessed and then calculated how much space each object required. The result was the Øresund shelf range, developed between 1955 and 1967, which had the commendable, if lofty, ambition of solving every domestic storage problem with which Danes might be presented.

  Like many democratic concepts in Denmark, this progressive design culture was not a sudden invention. “It came out of that whole folk high school, co-op way of thinking,” explains Thomas Dickson, author of a large tome with a fairly self-explanatory title: Dansk Design. “A lot of architects joined something called the Architect Help. They designed blueprints for farmhouses, schools, tenement buildings – and they gave them away for free. Anyone could get a copy. If you needed to build a farmhouse, you could get a blueprint for just the cost of the print.”

  Schools were designed by respected architects; old people’s homes were furnished by designers. “And that process of giving stuff away for free,” adds Dickson, whose office chair is incidentally a version of The Chair by Hans Wegner, “came out of the concept of sharing farm resources.” This meant that by the time the 30s arrived, a generation of Danes had grown up surrounded by – and with an appreciation for – good design, while a generation of designers had grown up understanding the need to make that design available to all.

  It is this egalitarian legacy that Denmark’s old-school furniture-makers have now partly lost. While researching this book, I became obsessed with finding where that legacy might now be. At first, it made sense to look for it in the offices of young furniture firms like Muuto, Mater and Hay. Of these, Muuto have made the most visible attempt to position themselves as a new direction in Danish design – their slogan is “New Nordic Design” – and so it was there that I headed first.

  Once I arrive, what surprises me is how this tagline is in fact more a branding exercise than a manifesto for a new design movement. They are new Nordic, rather than new Danish, for a reason: they don’t want to be tied down to one country, one set of values, or for their pieces to have a recognisable aesthetic. Tellingly, Muuto represent designers not just from Denmark, but from across Scandinavia – and even then they would prefer to be seen as international players, rather than from a particular region. The triple concepts of affordability, simplicity, and attention to detail – standard throughout Scandinavian design – are still central to them, but in aesthetic terms, they’d rather not be seen as simply Scandinavian, or even simply Muuto.

  “At Muuto, we try to make stuff that is not all the same kind of design,” says the firm’s co-founder Kristian Byrge, who perhaps unsurprisingly, given his nose for a good slogan, has a background in business rather than furniture. “It has a variation in materials, and in looks. So you can actually put our work together in a home and you don’t feel like it’s a Muuto home.”

  One of Muuto’s most prominent pieces is the Around, a coffee table by Thomas Bentzen. You can see it on sale at big museums like Humlebaek’s Louisiana Gallery – a simple, squat, three-legged disc, coated in block colours and ringed with a tall rim that does not quite stretch around the table’s entire circumference. Trying to work out what it is to be a furniture designer in the post-Jacobsen era, I ask Bentzen to take me through the process that led him to create it.

  It emerges that the table’s only distinctive feature – the rim with the gap in it – is both inspired by the rimmed coffee tables of the Danish Modern period, and necessitated by the flaws of contemporary manufacturing.

  “Looking back at my childhood,” says Bentzen, a tall, bald, softly spoken Dane, “the coffee tables I used to love often had an edge, and so I knew that I wanted to work with one.”

  In the old days, though, that edge would have been carved by hand from a solid block of wood. Today, this process would be too costly and too lengthy – so Bentzen’s rim actually comes from a separate piece of wood, and is stuck to the rest of the table with glue. And the difficulty with this method is that the glued rim cannot stretch all the way around the table – hence the gap.

  I like the table, and Bentzen’s explanation makes it clear how a contemporary furniture designer might be inspired by Danish Modern, and yet diverge from it. But something doesn’t quite add up – and eventually I realise it’s because we’ve spent ten minutes talking about what a table looks like, rather than how that table might help shape people’s behaviour. In aesthetic terms, I understand how the table relates to Danish Modern – but, like the beautiful work at Fritz Hansen, I can’t work out how it channels the movement’s sense of democratic design. Sure, it’s affordable – but it’s not as cheap as IKEA. Sure, it’s good quality, and good-looking, and it’s even made by the same cooperative – FDB – who made Danish Modern ranges for the masses in the 50s. But there’s the rub: it’s not solving domestic problems like Børge Mogensen’s shelves aimed to. It’s being sold to tourists at Denmark’s biggest art galleries. I like Muuto, and I like their work. But I came here in search of Danish Modernism’s spiritual successors, and I am not sure these are them.

  Again, this isn’t a criticism. It’s just an acknowledgement that furniture design can no longer have the same social impact that it at least aimed to have in the 50s. Of course, design doesn’t have to change the world to be beautiful. As Peter Bundgaard Rützou – the co-creator of another contemporary classic: the stool you can find in one of Denmark’s largest bakery chains – points out: “This whole discussion about the role of the designer, it’s great. But you still need a chair to sit on. And I like the fact a chair is THERE. I like the fact it’s physically there. So even though I like the ideas behind, say, interaction design, and the way it addresses what kind of society we live in, I find more personal pleasure in this stuff.”

  You can’t really argue with that. But at the same time, it’s interesting that Bundgaard Rützou implicitly acknowledges that furniture design no longer “addresses what kind of society we live in”. To find the people who today best channel the democratic values of Danish Modern, you probably need to look elsewhere.

  It turns out that this is also one of Dickson’s biggest bugbears. “A lot of the design made today is made in a tradition that is 40 years old,” he argues. “A lot of these young furniture and lightning designers still live in this dream of being the new Hans Wegner or Arne Jacobsen. And I think they’re barking up the wrong tree. If they want to design furniture they need to understand that we don’t need the same kind of furniture and objects that we used to need. We have different lives than our parents and grandparents had. But I see a lot of young designers designing what are basically sculptures, large heavy chairs that you walk around like you’d walk around a Henry Moore sculpture. But most of us don’t need this at home. We want to easily convert a piece of furniture into a bed, so that if we have guests, they can have a place to sleep.”


  Dickson says his view is unpopular with traditional designers – but he has a lively ally in Juul-Sørensen, who praises firms like Muuto and Hay, but thinks there’s more to design than furniture.

  “If Arne Jacobsen was around today, he would not design chairs,” claims Juul-Sørensen. “We don’t want any more chairs. Why the hell should we produce more chairs? I mean, there are enough chairs, everyone is pumping out chairs. These things which have no meaning in the society we are moving into.”

  Like Dickson, Juul-Sørensen thinks the future of interior design is in creating things that have more than one use – but his ideas are slightly more zany. “Could we actually design a dishwasher that is also an oven?” he asks. “Why isn’t a washing machine a games console?” It’s not such a far-fetched idea, Juul-Sørensen argues. A Playstation that only worked if you filled it with clothes might encourage children to wash more.

  He may sound slightly flippant – but Juul-Sørensen has a serious point. The most progressive designers working in Denmark today are the ones who recognise that the world faces different problems from the ones it did in the 50s. They’re the people creating wind turbines for Vestas, the world’s leading windmill company. They’re the architects at 3XN researching how to build offices out of biomass, or the NovoNordisk engineers who revolutionised the treatment of diabetics with the pre-filled insulin syringe. Nowadays, says Dickson, they might not even be designing physical objects. “They might be more problem-orientated than object-orientated,” he says. “They recognise that solving a problem might not lead to designing an object, but a solution. A service or communication or procedure.”

  One such group is Hatch and Bloom, founded five years ago by four young designers in Aarhus. They’re not nearly as big as Denmark’s most famous solutions-based firm, DesignIt, but their work is just as interesting: much of it centres on trying to solve problems within the infrastructure of Denmark’s welfare state. Most recently, they were asked to help Randers Hospital improve its care of what were then called “complex” patients – people who suffered from both a medical problem, and a surgical one, like a diabetic with a broken leg. Their treatment was considered too costly and lengthy, and so Hatch and Bloom spent time analysing the hospital to find out what processes could be made better. “Eventually we realised: this is not about the patients,” remembers Jacob Fruensgaard Øe, one of the firm’s founders. “It’s about the hospital. The patient isn’t complex. The hospital is.”

  Hatch and Bloom discovered that though many surgical specialists were at the top of their game, they seemed to have forgotten over the course of their career how to deal with medical issues – and vice versa. So the designers worked out ways to integrate the different disciplines, most of them conceptual rather than physical. Some suggestions focussed on changing the way doctors perceived complex patients.

  “One night we snuck into the hospital,” says Fruensgaard Øe. “We had these little posters. And we posted them on everything, from toilet paper to uniforms to parking lots and water glasses. The posters said: ‘only for medical staff’; ‘only for surgical staff’. We did it as a stunt. To make them look at their culture and realise that this hospital apartheid is not good for anyone.”

  Other ideas were more practical. Hatch and Bloom suggested that rather than splitting the care of a complex patient between different departments, they should be placed in a special ward devoted to complex treatment, where specific doctors and nurses should coordinate all aspects of their recovery. Ideas-based consultancy like this is often mocked, but in this case, it had results: treatment times for complex patients (now called cross-patients after another Hatch and Bloom suggestion) is down by a fifth. Though they barely work with physical objects, Fruensgaard Øe thinks his firm is among the worthiest inheritors of the Danish design tradition. “Fifty years ago, these chairs changed something. But we can’t do that again. We’ve had our share of chairs now. We’ve had our share of furniture. What we’re doing – the immaterial, service part – is what, when people look back in 50, 70 years, will be talked about.”

  Whether this is true remains to be seen, but it’s certainly the way things are going at the moment. Traditionally, Denmark’s top design school has been at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen – but the one most people are talking about these days is in a small provincial town in Jutland. With no furniture department and a focus on industrial and interactive design, you could argue the rise of Kolding Design school mirrors that of Denmark. Even ten years ago, Kolding was still very focussed on what things looked like.

  “Aesthetics, aesthetics, aesthetics,” says the eccentric Barnabas Wetton, an expat Brit, a former BBC reporter, and now a director of studies in interaction design at Kolding. “Aesthetics. We were very good at aesthetics. All around us, society was changing so rapidly – yet I could only see students who could make nice things, but weren’t very effective.” In 2003, the school made its first trip to China – and it was there that he says they realised “that people became better and fuller and happier designers when they understood they were working for others and not just for themselves, and that they were able to provide real value to society.”

  It sparked a sea change at Kolding, and a decade later they have an international reputation for interaction design. Their approach is not exactly unique, but it is more successful than many. According to Wetton, the school and its affiliates have exhibited six times at New York’s Museum of Modern Art – more than any other education institution in Europe.

  At Kolding, design is now taught “as a social practice; design as a way of organising the way that we act in societies.” One of his PhD students, Eva Knutz, is analysing how to use computer games to get hospitalised children to express their feelings – emotional design, she calls it – while another unionised the Danish modelling industry.

  These projects may sound slightly vague, or at least very removed from conventional perceptions of design. But Wetton’s is the most convincing explanation I’ve heard of how traditional Danish design ideals can be applied to the modern world.

  “We have a serious problem in Europe and in the Western world. We have to reorganise our societies for the post-industrial age and for the green age. This means we have to take our societies apart and rebuild them and remake them into something else.”

  Kolding wants to be at the forefront of this reorganisation. To do this, the school has had to rethink exactly which practical skills it should teach its students. Their work is now as much about researching how people behave as it is about making things for them, and so the course has been restructured accordingly.

  “There’s a whole series of techniques our students learn regardless of what field they’re in,” says Wetton. “Working with people, the way it is you ask questions, the way it is you glean knowledge from the situation we’re designing for.”

  Sometimes this process takes the form of “body-storming” – like a brainstorm, but using physical rather than mental experiences to stimulate ideas. Recently, robotics researchers at the University of Southern Denmark asked a group of Kolding students to design the interface for a robot that could be used to take blood samples in Danish hospitals instead of human nurses. As part of the project’s body-storm phase, every single student had to learn to take blood from real patients. “We had to understand that fear of having blood taken, to understand the process of it.” What they soon realised was that patients would only stand for their arm being injected with a syringe by a robot if a) they couldn’t see the injection taking place; and b) the robot looked nothing like a robot. So what they came up with instead was a cosy, dolphin-shaped armrest into which a patient would slot her arm. A hidden infrared ray would then identify the right vein, an unseen syringe would pop out momentarily, prick the skin and then shoot back into the armrest, ready for testing.

  Quite why such an extraordinary robot was designed in the first place – and the implications it has for Denmark’s massive welfare state – will be explored i
n the next chapter.

  4. POOR CARINA:

  the problem with the welfare state

  “The welfare state we have is excellent in most ways. We only have this little problem. We can’t afford it.” – Gunnar Viby Mogensen

  There is a well-known sketch by a pair of Norwegian comedians in which a Dane tries to buy a bike tyre from a hardware store. Things begin badly. The man behind the counter can’t understand his compatriot’s accent – but is too embarrassed to say so. Instead, he just takes a wild guess at what the cyclist wants and hands over a long file. Then things get worse. It turns out the cyclist can’t understand the vendor either, but is similarly too polite to admit it. So he pretends the file is what he wanted all along and asks how much it costs. The vendor tells him, but again the cyclist can’t work out what was said, so he ends up holding out a fistful of Danish kroner and allows the hardware man to pluck the appropriate amount from his hands. To round off the farce, a cunning milkman enters to ask if the store needs 1000 milk bottles. Again, the vendor can’t understand a word of the milkman’s question, says yes simply to make things easier and is landed with one of the largest domestic grocery bills ever known in Scandinavia.

  The sketch’s popularity on YouTube shows how successfully it riffs on traditional Scandinavian stereotypes. The Swedes and the Norwegians think the Danes are loud, brash and unintelligible – even to each other. The Danes think the Swedes (their medieval rivals) are uptight control freaks. Both joke that the Norwegians are mere provincial bumpkins (Norway was once a colony of both Denmark and Sweden), while everyone thinks the Finns are weird. You can see a tongue-in-cheek exaggeration of these hackneyed tropes in the first episode of The Bridge, when a Danish detective (played by Kim Bodnia) is paired with a Swedish one (Sofia Helin) after a dead body is found draped over the two countries’ mutual border. When a woman needs to drive through a crime scene to get to her husband’s hospital, Bodnia – the laid-back Dane – gives her the go-ahead before Helin – the pedantic Swede – slaps him down. Later, Bodnia tries to make a joke to a group of Swedish coppers. Cue: tumbleweed. Like in the Norwegian skit, no one understands him.