Pekka Harni lives and works in Helsinki and has collaborated with industrial designer Yuka Takahashi since 2002. Harni is an architect (MSc) and industrial designer (MA), who works widely in applied art, furniture design and architecture. He studied architecture in Austria and Finland, as well as industrial design in Finland. Harni has designed products for leading design companies, such as Marimekko and Arabia in Finland, and Satira in Portugal. In 1999, he received the Design Plus Award at the Ambiente Frankfurt Fair. He has been teaching at the Aalto University School of Art and Design since 1988. He has also been a visiting lecturer in several European design universities and a leader of several design workshops in Europe and in Mexico. His theoretical framework on morphological “object categories”, which divides basic home objects into seven functional and morphological categories, has been applied and employed in several European design schools. His work can be found in several museum collections, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Arabia Museum, Helsinki, Finland; and the Design Museum, Helsinki.
PLANET B
Planet B is a flower vase, Harni’s submission to the “How to Change the World with a Flower Vase” exhibition at the 4th Attese Biennial of Ceramics in Madrid, January 2010. The name “Planet B” indicates “Plan B”: we urgently need a Plan B if we are to sustain human life on this planet. It is a ceramic art object, a molded, low temperature ceramic majolica with a traditional cobalt blue glazing. The product is made in a small series by local artisans and ceramic masters in Albisola, Italy, and it continues their very long tradition in a renewed shape.
