SPECULATIVE
DESIGN — OBJECT AS
ENVIRONMENTAL
ACTIVIST Olli Majalahti
07 / 10 / 2025    









Olli Majalahti’s article, originally published in our second issue, is an op-ed style response to the editorial written by Anni Pokela and Jenna Viro, published in the first issue of Sälä. You can read the text by Pokela and Viro here.
                   At Sälä, we encourage open discussion in and about the field of design, and we welcome all kinds of comments, answers, critiques and contributions that our articles may inspire.










In the first issue of Sälä, the editorial Tuhon muoto written by Anni Pokela and Jenna Viro explored the roles of design in the era of ecological destruction. Just as it began to approach the question of what design could or should be today, the text ended. I was frustrated by the lack of answers it provided. But it had this one idea that I want to continue from. “We don't need novelty, but things that fuel creativity and imagination, and that help us imagine different futures. [...] What the surrounding world looks like is always a topical question. Let us dare to be brave.”

Too often, today’s design defines sustainability through quantifiable measures such as carbon footprint, recyclability, or circularity. These are important tools, but they are not enough. There is more to design than what can be measured. How an object participates in human experience and how it shapes conversation, emotion, or memory is harder to measure but just as real as the quantifiable properties. Life Cycle Assessment tools don’t account for these effects. Design must be more than efficient. It must also be expressive, political, and speculative. So, in this project, I set out to make an object that could become an active ally of nature by embodying a story and taking a stance on an event where nature lost. The coffee table is part of my thesis work, in which I focus on emotionally durable design and the effect of aesthetics on experience. Through this project, I began to ask questions: what kind of stories do objects carry? Could they take a stand? Could they act?

This idea draws from Actor-Network Theory (ANT)1, developed by Bruno Latour and others in the 1980s. ANT challenges traditional distinctions between subjects and objects by arguing that both human and nonhuman entities play active roles in shaping the world. In this framework, an “actant” is a source of action. It is neither subject nor object, but an intervener. To me, this coffee table functions as an actant. Action should be considered as a mixture of many surprising sets of agencies. ANT explores who and what participates in the action. For designers, ANT helps uncover hidden actors embedded in artefacts and opens up new design opportunities beyond traditional human-centered thinking.

One example of this is my project, exploring how an object can act as an environmental activist by embedding a story of ecological destruction into its form. The story is about the Stansvik area in Helsinki, a site of ongoing conflict between urban development and biodiversity. The city plans to build housing in an area of old and rare nature, home to endangered species. Activists and residents have resisted these plans, proposing alternatives that would protect the landscape2. Their resistance has slowed the development, but the plans remain unchanged.

The situation at Stansvik has been ongoing for years, but at the time, while working on this project, construction had already begun. The events there carry significance beyond the site itself. They reflect a broader pattern, where nature is present in branding and strategy, but rarely in actual decisions. Since 2023, activists and residents have emphasized the ecological value of the Stansvik area and proposed alternatives to the plans, yet the City of Helsinki has made no changes to its original plan.

I wanted to create an object that takes a stand. It shouldn’t exist only to be admired, but to invite reflection and dialogue. I wanted to move away from a kind of design that relies on instant admiration but offers little in terms of lasting meaning. In a capitalist society, the pursuit of immediate impact often comes at the expense of experiential depth.

I’ve always been drawn to the rocks of the archipelago; their shapes and their varying smooth and rough surfaces. What fascinates me about the texture of rocks is the tactile sensitivity it invites and the sense of weight and age they carry. Texture calls for touch. Often, sight dominates how we experience objects, but prioritizing the eye doesn't have to mean ignoring the other senses3.

The tabletop was cast using a two-part slip-cast mold. One half of the mold is a plaster slab made directly from the rock surface, capturing its texture in detail. The rock texture is unique to a specific place in Stansvik. It was collected just weeks before the rock was blasted to build a new street, Varisluodonkatu. The legs of the table are made from a tree that was cut down from the same location in Stansvik where the rock texture is from. 









The tabletop’s texture is not smooth. It is not optimized for easy use. It interrupts and irritates you when you try to wipe it clean. It holds conflict. It stands in domestic space, yet carries the memory of an erased landscape. It is a quiet advocate that is present and speaks on nature’s behalf in a conversation. This object doesn’t function as a neutral piece of furniture. It resists smoothness and creates friction.

Capitalism produces smooth and polished products designed to generate instant likes and pleasure. Not only are their surfaces smooth, but also their identities and values are smoothed out. These products are easy to understand, easy to share, and easy to consume.4 Similarly, in sustainability, numbers are easy to decode, and it is smooth to show the carbon footprint of a product. Smoothness sells. Companies are trying to smooth out all the friction that exists in the effort of moving through systems. The narrative that takes a stance is not smooth. It challenges the user and interrupts their flow, creating friction.

Brand identity is already a story that objects carry. In most cases, it hides the origins of the object behind an artificial narrative. The material extraction, labor, and impacts are wiped out and replaced by the brand story. If we can so easily hide reality behind products, why not build narrative into objects in a way that brings climate or nature to the surface? If a company claims to support climate action, why wouldn’t it speak through its products more radically?

We tend to think of products as static artifacts. But through this project, I aim to show how objects can be more: collaborators in a process, or invitations for dialogue. Especially in polarized times, climate talk can be emotionally charged. People may resist or withdraw, but an object holding a climate-centered story can shift the weight of the message away from the personal. It opens space for discussion through confrontation and creates room for reflection by presenting a grounded narrative. The object becomes a participant in a conversation.

The idea of play or playful (leikki in Finnish), which was introduced in the first issue’s editorial, remained somewhat ambiguous. Play is creative, experimental, often also joyful, but above all, it is a form of action. In a game, objects interact with players, and through this interaction, they gain agency. Recognizing these agencies and understanding how people relate to things is a powerful design tool. Objects always interact with users, and something emerges from that exchange. Framing play in this way helps to ground it more concretely within design practice as something that can provoke change and make the play more concrete in a context of design.

From this standpoint, nonhuman things don’t replace human actors, but they are vital players in the world. Actions are rarely under the full control of conscious individuals. They emerge from networks of influence, including the material world. There might exist metaphysical effects between causality and inexistence. Things can encourage, permit, resist, or render possible, and together with persons, they make up the social milieu.  While speculative design may not solve climate issues directly, it can help create landing places for new ideas. Like airplanes need runways, ideas need spaces to land.






1. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social : an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.

2. Suojellaan Stansvik website: https://stansvik.info/

3. Pallasmaa, J. (2012). The eyes of the skin : architecture and the senses (3rd ed.). Wiley.

4. Han, B. (2017). Saving beauty. Polity Press.