Can happiness be designed? A Helsinki exhibition looks for an answer

It was a twin masterstroke for the team at Helsinki Design Week, on the occasion of their 20th anniversary, to tackle the subject of happiness, and to recruit the excellent curator (and errant Finn) Anniina Koivu to deliver the 2025 festival’s principal exhibition.

As anyone with even a hint of interest in the somewhat spurious trend of happiness ranking will know, Finland has topped the UN’s annual ‘World Happiness Report’ for the last eight years. With her exhibition, Koivu held a metaphorical smiley face up to the mirror (emojis and circus mirrors do feature in the show) and asked: ‘Can happiness be designed?’ In her self-reflective and far-reaching show, the answer appeared to be yes – though Koivu concluded her curator statement beautifully ambiguously with the answer: 'We think so.'

‘Happiness’ at Helsinki Design Week 2025

Readers may remember Koivu for her landmark ‘U-Joints’ show (co-curated with Andrea Caputo) from Milan Design Week in 2018, and her heroic deep dive into the prepping movement with ‘We Will Survive’ at Mudac in Lausanne in 2024. She is a fascinating, light-hearted and rigorous curator, and ‘Happiness’ followed suit with her characteristic taxonomic approach to the subject in question.

The exhibition occupied a series of rooms on the fourth floor of the 1911 Suomitalo building, which was this year’s hub for Helsinki Design Week. Various themes around happiness were explored in different rooms – health, community, music, nature, for instance. The themes were extrapolated into representative objects: some Finnish, some universal, some literal, some oblique, some cerebral, some pop-cultural. Each revealed something about happiness, and Koivu’s zippy, zesty captions held our hand throughout the journey – they were a joy.

The show was an uplifting romp, as one might expect. But happiness is a complex subject, paradoxical by its very nature, as Koivu pointed out in her opening statement: ‘[Happiness] is both deeply personal and undeniably collective,’ she wrote. ‘It cannot exist or be truly experienced without its opposite: sorrow, pain or discomfort.’

The counterpoint frequently raised by Finns themselves to deflect the glow of being so ruddy happy, is that the nation also has a remarkably high suicide rate, too. Speaking with Koivu at the show’s opening, she admitted to having found the subject matter a welcome relief – riotously fun, surely – after years’ spent digging into the murkier realm of survivalism for her previous project. ‘But where do you begin?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘There is so much that could be said, and has been said, about happiness – is it even worth taking seriously?’

In a word: yes. Happiness might not easily be measurable or definable in the stricter sense, but by god it is identifiable and relatable. It makes us feel human and alive, and brings us together, and we can learn from spotting, thinking, plotting. Trite though it sounds, happiness is powerful. It is needed right now, and it makes a fascinating lens through which to consider objects, familiar and unfamiliar, such as a chainsaw (for ice-cutting, for cold plunges) or sex toys.

A Jane Fonda fitness video sat near an orange fibreglass section of a bench from the Helsinki metro (‘We wanted to bring sunshine underground,’ said its designers Börje Rajalin and Antti Nurmesniemi in 1979). Seventy stories about the history of the smile, from 1700 BC up to the present day, graced a wall in one room. Local studio Company’s felt ‘Dance Shoes’, for small children to dance on their parents’ feet, were enduringly endearing, 20 years after they were discovered serendipitously when two shoe sketches happened to overlap each other. A happy accident, no less.

There were moments of profundity and poignancy too. Koivu relishes the cerebral corners and darker shadows, which happily avoided the show’s descending into saccharinity. We read that the Global Wellness Institute valued the wellness economy in 2023 at 5.4 trillion euros, and Koivu promptly pointed out that this industry thrives on unhappiness.

Drugs and products delivering endorphin rushes were dealt with as indicators of our tendencies as animals to choose a quick fix for feeling good, even at the expense of our future selves. Koivu ended the exhibition with a tongue-in-cheek bowl of pick-n-mix, asking visitors to take one for a quick sugar high if, after a whole show on happiness, they still needed cheering up. (Reader: I ate the sweets; a sign only of my love for candy, not my dissatisfaction with the show, I hasten to add.)

The exhibition design was by XPO, Koivu’s frequent collaborators, and was charming – turning silver-wrapped gift boxes into plinths, and suspending silver helium-filled balloons in the air with gift tags for exhibition texts. Anything less joyful might have jarred self-consciously – as it was, the shiny material united the disparate objects, lending a celebratory halo to proceedings.

Koivu commissioned ten designers to create pieces for the show. ‘It was interesting that for most of them, happiness means a working state of flow,’ Koivu reflected. ‘Being allowed to focus and detach within one’s work rather than escape it.’ It’s a salient point that recurred throughout the show: potential happiness can be found in much of life – frequently, we are our own obstacles. This is where design comes in handy – it can help us get over ourselves, whether to reduce our self-inflicted admin, give us a jolt of joy, or enliven us to feel childish, wild, unbounded, and animal.

As with both ‘U-Joints’ and ‘We Will Survive’, this first iteration of ‘Happiness’ will evolve and be shown again at Milan Design Week 2026. For Koivu, it offers a chance to continue the thinking and research, and to add more to an already riveting body of work. ‘I want to include a mushroom basket in Milan, definitely,’ she told me with a straight face. ‘It would have been far too obvious here in Finland, because we already know picking mushrooms is the real secret to a happy life,’ she laughed. Fungi – of course – the clue was in the name all along…

anniinakoivu.com
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Also read Hugo Macdonald’s highlights of Helsinki Design Week 2025