ARTEFAKTI25

How do you curate a space of contact between designers, artists and visitors? Could the growth of a plant be seen as a process of making? What gives a home its richness and depth? How do we keep the things we cannot hold, things like our dreams and our dead? How can designers enable circularity, balancing beauty and fragility with reparability and different scales? So many species inhabit the same world, but where do we place ourselves within this? 

The third iteration of ARTEFAKTI, the graduation exhibition of the Contemporary Design MA programme, took place from September 5.-14. 2025, at Valssaamo, Kaapelitehdas as part of Helsinki Design Week.

Participating graduates of ARTEFAKTI25: 

Aarni Tujula, Birta Rós Brynjólfsdóttir, Dario Aguet, Federico Fiermonte, Hana Rehorčíková, Harvey Shaw, Jimin Hong, Merika Ina Katrina Oksanen, Paulina Varis, Mirva Kosonen, Pegah Shamloo, Wenla Nwajei, Xuanpu Huang,Vala Boucht & Zoë Robertson.

Design is inescapable for us in our modern lives, shaping the way we interact with the world. For those who choose to see it, it offers a voice to be heard, and for those willing to make it, it offers an ear to be spoken to. 

Design is no longer a discipline of creating forms 

…its function is no longer intended to be seamless, its function is to be critical… 

…critical on current affairs, critical on a maker's relationship to their objects, critical on definitions, critical on research, critical on expectations, critical on who we are. And forever critical on what design actually is. 

Approaching design from this multidisciplinary perspective, the Contemporary Design students engage in questions of materiality, and research of methods and processes. Although very different in their areas of focus, all are united by a thoughtful, experimental, and critical approach to design. This allows these young designers to delve into designing with and for living beings, memory and grief, technology-driven craft, or human–non-human relationships. 

Rather than celebrating objects, the exhibitors of Artefakti are letting these artefacts tell new narratives and experiences. Mirva Kosonen for example, explored her relationship to ceramics after discovering an old box full of reindeer bones and forgotten research on these bones’ potential use in making bone china. The pieces she made based on this treasure find, present a delicate thoughtfulness reflecting her journey with this emotional material.

Rooted in the Finnish expression "pitää kuin kukkaa kämmenellä" (“to hold like a flower in the palm of your hand”), Paulina Varis investigated her connection to fragility working on a collection of protective glass jewellery, which both shields and slows down the wearer. 

Harvey Shaw and Aarni Tujula both ask questions about collaboration: in material, human, and interspecies ways. Shaw’s “Toad.Stool” is an exploration of growing mycelium into a piece of furniture in an attempt to bridge the wild and the cultivated. Tujula’s mini kitchen, “To Gather Together”, allows people to cook anywhere in the open and share a meal in unusual contexts. 

Dario Aguet and Hana Rehorčíková explore, in very different ways, how designers can create circularity in products and systems. Aguet’s RE-SOUND shows how a Bluetooth speaker could be designed with a focus on easy reparability and re-assembly, while Rehorčíková explores invasive reed as an opportunity for sustainable applications in craft, construction, and furniture. 

With graduates hailing from Finland, Canada, the UK, Iceland, Italy, Iran, Slovenia, and beyond, ARTEFAKTI reflects the international and interdisciplinary design community of Aalto. 

ARTEFAKTI26 will return for the next edition of Helsinki Design Weeek, featuring the works from future graduates.