Visit www.opendarkness.com to view podcasts and videos.

OpenDarkness

Making Openings | Foresight | Podcasting | Visual Research | Binary Thought | Darkness

www.opendarkness.com is a research project dedicated to exploring the presence and value of darkness. How can darkness be seen? Why are we drawn towards it and what makes us repel it? The basic premise of this project is that an openness towards all kinds of darkness will be needed for a more sustainable and inclusive future. Is there something inherently powerful, beautiful or beneficial in darkness?

Winter in Finland

I first began pondering about darkness when spending the winter of 2018 in Finland. I had just moved for a year abroad and the speed at which the days were shortening was outright scary. At the same time, according to the World Happiness Report, Finns were declared once again the happiest people on the planet. This thought was triggering. Is there some value in darkness after all?
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Sunset on Suomenlinna island. Picture taken on 25/11/2018 at 14:44.

The DarkBark, an information structure to support the writing process.

Gathering signals and stories

To understand if there was any value in darkness, I began collecting stories from people growing up in Finland. As desk research, I tried to look for phenomena where darkness is not connected to negativity but is rather associated with beauty, power or benefit.
I captured the research as sets of signals, and while being immersed in the topic, I began writing down my observations. Eventually, a piece of text, a vision has come about in which I try to argue why there is a shift to the appreciation of darkness.

Annual Reality Report

Embracing darkness is still absolute taboo in the corporate world. This becomes especially evident when browsing through enterprises' Annual Reports. There, the goal is clearly to make things bigger as they are, to communicate only profits and to show the brightest sides.

What if that was different? What if an Annual Report would be more like an Annual Reality Report (ARR) that does not only review the company’s economic, social and environmental impacts, but also to share their failures, short-comings and learnings?

What position does the company hold in local communities, the society and the planet as a whole? How does it contribute and where does it borrow? To illustrate what an ARR could feel like, I hacked Finnair's Annual Report and changed the content to what I think they should write about.

Example of an Annual Reality Report created for Finnair, a major Finnish airline.

www.opendarkness.com

Upon immersing myself into the topic of darkness, I developed a framework on how darkness can be seen. From there, I picked three interpretations of darkness (1. anxiety, 2. emptiness in music and 3. a storm as weather phenomenon) and explored those in podcast and video. Everything was put together on www.opendarkness.com as a space on the web dedicated to investigating the value and presence of darkness.