Anniina Koivu

Anniina Koivu is a design writer, curator, consultant and teacher, who divides her time between Milan and Lausanne. She works across a number of fields, from curation to art direction, product development, and editorial and research projects, which she develops for clients such as Kvadrat, Iittala, Vitra, Camper and the Fogo Island Workshops and Shorefast Foundation.

In autumn 2021, U-Joints – A taxonomy of connections, developed together with Andrea Caputo, will be published. The encyclopedic publication is the result of a three-year research project and exhibition series that look at human history through joints. U-JOINTS has been exhibited during the week of the Salone del Mobile.Milano 2018; A taxonomy of nails, screws, bolts, rivets and nuts was on show at elac/ECAL in 2019, the Adhesives and fusions chapter is open at the Gewerbemuseum Winterthur until January 2022.

Her latest research and publication is Vico Magistretti: Stories of Objects (Triest/Ecal, 2020), the result of an investigation of the little-considered moment in the lifespan of design products when production stops, with a focus on the reasons that lead up to this end of the design object. She wrote the comprehensive monograph on Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec Works (Phaidon, 2011) and has edited and contributed to a number of publications such as Materialising Colour: Journeys with Giulio Ridolfo (Phaidon, 2020), Atlas of Furniture Design (Vitra Design Museum, 2019), Industrial Facility (Phaidon, 2018), Arita 2016/ (Phaidon, 2017), The Walking Society (Lars Müller Publishers, 2015) and Pierre Charpin’s Entre Les Vases (Birkhäuser, 2009), among others. Serving as editor-in-chief on Interwoven (Kvadrat, 2020), Anniina launched the first print issue of the (online) magazine on contemporary culture and independent criticism. Among her other curatorial works are Tehdas–Fabrik–Factory (Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale, 2019), an exhibition exploring the diversity of contemporary design production, and Typologie: the wine bottle and the cork stopper (Milan, 2019). She has been a speaker, moderator and juror at international design competitions and events.

She is Head of Master Theory at ECAL/ University of Art and Design Lausanne.