Even as Helsinki Design Week prepares for this year, the future is always on our minds. Next year, Helsinki is the World Design Capital, and all eyes will be on us. Behind the scenes, plans are being drawn up, projects developed, and creative minds recruited to help with it all. One of the creative personalities who will help shape future design weeks and the goals and plans for the World Design Capital year is Thomas Ermacora, a design-driven social entrepreneur who is a partner in diverse innovation ventures and environments such as inhabitat.com, the INDEX awards, RIBA Building Futures and Bioneers.org. Ermacora brings his expertise on social innovation as the founder of CLEAR VILLAGE as well as his knowledge of new media, which he develops with artists such as Imogen Heap in their collaborative endeavour the bubbletank.org, to strengthen the advisory board of Helsinki Design Week. What is your role in the advisory board? The advisory board is a “dream team” of people who can help direct the events in 2012. The reason for the dream team is to enable the World Design Capital program next year to gather talent together, to be a lab for creative solutions. Helsinki Design Week can be an urban change catalyst. We are not just showing design to designers, but to find new ways to benefit society and the local city itself. How? Helsinki Design Week can gather networks of designers and design weeks. Next year could be the launch of this networking project, which is dear to Kari Korkman, a visionary in this landscape. The local week can be an environment to facilitate this, like a participatory design lab which we hope could focus on a local issue and tap into the know-how and intelligence that flows through design week. We want to make an impact and go further than the traditional ephemeral excitement, in other words, establish it as a concrete process which perdures. What will we see? The concept must be one that can be explored over many years. There are three themes I'd like to be present in some respect. The first is biomimicry. Nature is our teacher. We are learning to tap into the way that nature itself evolved, and copy these developments to replace mechanistic solutions we've relied on for too long in our own innovations. Another important theme for design week is fulfilling social innovation through participatory design. Future designers will become the vehicles of change, allowing nondesigners to play with their toys. This is about making sure the other 90 percent of the world gets some of the same benefits of innovation. There aren't enough designers to design tomorrow's places and products, but like what we see with Wikipedia and open source movements or creative commons licensing, we are finding that the curiosity for informed do-it-yourself is an emergent trend even in the design space, which could radically improve the penetration of design into new social strata and bottom-of-the-pyramid contexts. And lastly, there is the digital city. We need to find ways to leverage interactive technology to bridge the gap between material and non-material environments.