We took the team to Copenhagen for 3 Days of Design. Here's an honest account of what we saw, what we thought, and why a 5K run was probably the most useful thing we did all week.

I'll be honest, I went to Copenhagen with fairly low expectations. After Milan Design Week, which for all its chaos and excess does deliver a kind of creative overload that I find genuinely energising, I wasn't sure a smaller, calmer festival would hit the same way. I was wrong, although not for the reasons I expected.

The city itself does a lot of the work. The metro functions seamlessly. The canals are beautiful. The pastries are taken very seriously and rightly so. Guy, our design engineer, described it as "almost aggressively built" for the kind of trip we were on, which I think is the right way to put it. When the London Design Festival comes around, it’s so close we dip in and out without really paying attention. Going to another city forces the break, and the break is key to the experience.

On the festival itself

The theme this year was Make This Moment Matter. Ambitious framing. In practice, Ben - our Senior Designer - felt most of the brands used it as a backdrop rather than a question. "The theme was largely diluted across brands that treated this as another opportunity to showcase great design, without asking whether any of it made the moment matter," he said. He's not wrong. “Chairs reigned supreme” as Andy put it. There were a lot of chairs.

But Andy also made the point that maybe we were looking for the wrong thing. Going to a design festival, he said, is "a bit like going to the zoo. You aren't there because you want to take every animal home. You're there to observe, be surprised, find something unusual and occasionally come across something that completely changes how you see the world around you." I've been thinking about that framing since we got back. It resets the bar in a useful way.

Whilst the talks at the Symposium raised some interesting discussions, it was Other Circle, a fringe event, that was my favourite thing at the whole festival. A rebellion against the corporate programming in town, it was more playful, experimental and provocative. Although still nothing as outrageous as you might find at Alcova in Milan - you are still in Scandinavia after all.

The things that actually landed

Ben was seeking out products that he could interact with in ways that didn’t involve just sitting down on them. Magic Audio Labs had a CD-slot scroll mechanism for navigating a music catalogue. Nostalgic but in a way that felt earned, and it gave the album back some of its weight as a format. A Muuto lamp with a counterbalance you raised or lowered with a single turn. Technogym's multi-weight dumbbell, which is not a new concept, but the dial was refined to the point where changing weight required no thought at all. One turn, done. And a candle, an LED one, that you blow out. 

Ben's belief is that the hardware isn't really the point. "What we are really talking about is the experience that hardware makes possible." The objects that stood out to him in Copenhagen were the ones where the design stepped back and the experience stepped forwards. Guy, more broadly, found himself impatient with the balance. He came for experimental work and provocations and mostly got high-end, market-ready furniture. "I was quite chair-ful after the first day," he said, which I think is a very Guy sentence.

The run club

On the Thursday morning of the festival a 5K run left from the Material Matters exhibition. Organised fun (if you like running) and well attended. Running and chatting with people from footwear, furniture, consumer tech and agencies. Nobody pitching anything. Just people in the same city for the same few days, with time to actually talk.

The conversations over coffee afterwards were different to the ones at panels or evening events. Andy made the point directly: "Those moments generate more value than the stands themselves." I think that's true. A design festival is a rare occasion where a lot of people with interesting jobs are in the same place with no particular urgency. The run gave a reason for a bunch of them to talk to each other.

Coming home

Guy came back inspired, just not by the exhibitions. "I'm definitely back to London inspired," he said. "Inspired that my beliefs are sound, and my feelings on the industry still ring true to me." He wants more from the industry than beautiful objects for people who can afford them. The Symposium raises those conversations but doesn't always push them to conclusions. 

On the whole, I came back more settled than I expected. On the plane over I'd been thinking about how much I missed the unexpectedness of Milan, the ugly and the emotional. By the time I landed home I'd changed my mind. The design world is increasingly caught up in fashion, in attention, in what's next. Copenhagen was a reminder that slowing down is not the same as falling behind. Sometimes a dose of good-is-enough is exactly what's needed. And spending time with the team away from the office is always beneficial.

Three days. A lot of chairs. One very good run. I'll be back.

Jo, and the team x

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