Life in Finland / Cultural storytelling / 2017-2018

National history, minus the marble pedestal.

Life in Finland explains a country through the things people made, used, saved, laughed at, and recognised. I shaped the collection so visitors could enter through an ordinary object and leave with a larger story about work, invention, obstacles, and joy.

Visit Life in Finland All case studies

Life in Finland digital collection showing Finnish objects and their stories.

chronological foundation

1917→

Objects connect individual stories to the years of Finnish independence.

chosen scale

Everyday

Recognition gives visitors a way into history without a lecture.

languages

Many

One structured collection travels without splitting into separate products.

digital afterlife

Still live

The collection kept its public value after the exhibition cycle.

The cultural problem

A country is too large for one story. An object is small enough to hold.

National exhibitions often begin with importance and end with distance. Life in Finland reversed that. Bark bread, a lock, banknotes, cough drops, and domestic objects make history concrete because people can picture a hand using them.

The interface needed to protect that intimacy while still supporting chronology, search, comparison, languages, image credits, institutional ownership, and the complete collection. The product had to feel like discovery, not database administration wearing a nicer coat.

The reading model

Recognise something. Follow its story. See the country differently.

01Enter through the object
A strong image and plain name create a low-friction invitation.
02Connect it to a year
Chronology turns a charming item into evidence of a changing society.
03Move across the collection
Search, browsing, and language changes let visitors build their own version of the story.

Object first

Let recognition do the opening work.

I kept the object—not a curatorial thesis—as the main invitation. A visitor can like a shape, remember a household item, or wonder why anybody saved it. Curiosity arrives before explanation, which is exactly where a cultural interface should meet people.

Images and object names lead the hierarchy
The year remains visible without overpowering the story
Credits and ownership stay attached to the material

Collection logic

Make browsing useful even when the visitor has no search term.

Most people cannot search for an object they do not know exists. I treated sequence, neighbouring years, and the full overview as discovery tools. Search helps with intent; the collection itself creates intent.

Chronological movement supplies a natural next step
Overview browsing supports fast jumps and comparison
Search and filters supplement discovery instead of replacing it

Multilingual content

One object should not become fifteen maintenance problems.

The language layer reused a shared content structure: stable object identity, year, image, owner, and story fields. That kept navigation predictable across translations and made missing or updated content easier to manage.

Shared identifiers keep language versions aligned
Language switching preserves the visitor’s place
Interface labels stay separate from editorial stories

Stewardship

A cultural website should not expire with the opening-night flowers.

Campaign logic treats launch as the finish line. I treated the collection as public infrastructure: something that could remain readable, be archived, be restored, and continue serving schools, museums, travellers, and curious people.

Structured content survives visual and technical change
The collection remains useful outside the original exhibition
Long-term access becomes part of product quality

After the exhibition

The physical tour ended. The public value did not.

Life in Finland continued the material beyond a single venue and audience. The online product gave the stories a longer life, a multilingual reach, and a way to be encountered without knowing the exhibition existed.

Years later, the sensible work was not to declare the old stack sacred. It was to preserve the collection, repair what time had broken, and keep the material accessible. Maintenance is not glamorous. Neither is losing cultural memory because nobody budgeted for an update.

A reusable content model instead of one-off campaign pages
Search and navigation that remain useful as the collection ages
Archiving and restoration treated as product work

HAAM’s role

I turned a collection into a navigable public product.

Product, interface, and operations

HAAM’s role covered the digital product concept, interaction model, interface design, multilingual content structure, responsive implementation, testing, and later stewardship.

Next case study

A large institution that does not need to feel like one.

View EKA