Salovaara Juhani

Juhani Salovaara strives to find sustainable product solutions, and he is inspired by designing products where the designer has to think beyond the content. A burning interest in design has guided Salovaara throughout his career, and he has the ability to inspire and lead teams out of their comfort zones into creativity. Salovaara applies an investigative, empathetic approach to people and situations. Even as a newly graduated designer, he found the best way for product design: he wants to involve the users of the products in the design process.

After graduating from the School of Art and Design as an industrial designer in 1967, Juhani Salovaara was recruited to work in the design department of Philips in the Netherlands. There he was introduced to ergonomics and perceptual psychology, which have been his guiding principles alongside ecology. During his career, Salovaara has designed for domestic industry and has co-founded a total of nine design companies. Salovaara has also worked as a professor at the University of Art and Design. In 2003, Salovaara’s design career was rewarded with the Industrial Designer of the Year award, and in 2016 he received the Kaj Franck Design Award from Design Forum Finland.

His archive contains a wide variety of documents, images, drawings, and prototypes from Salovaara’s career, created during the design process. Here you can see the catalogue of the archive, digitised photographs, and objects. Salovaara’s materials can also be found in the ED-Design´s archive.

Read more about Juhani Salovaaras’s career in the Design Archives’ Industrial Designers online exhibition.