Anne Stenros comes from a solid architectural and design background. She is the daughter of Architect Helmer Stenros, Professor Emeritus in architecture at the University of Tampere, and Professor and Interior Designer Pirkko Stenros, best known for her series of furniture for Muurame. Raised in the Tapiola “garden city” in Espoo, Anne Stenros makes her home in Kulosaari, Helsinki, with her common-law husband. Her favourite pastimes include sailing.
Photo Pertti Nisonen
By Johanna Lemola
Anne Stenros heads one of the three strategic spearheads that have put KONE at the top in the global elevators and escalators business: design.
“My first thought was that the letter had come to the wrong address, and I carefully checked that the envelope and the letter definitely bore the same name,” says Anne Stenros explaining her immediate reaction to a notification in the mail that she had won the City of Helsinki Golden Medal. The medal was presented to her on Helsinki Day 2013.
The Golden Medal is the City’s highest award conferred to individuals for exceptional personal achievement and contributions to the City. Stenros earned the recognition for her exemplary efforts to promote design in Finnish business and as a cornerstone of Finland’s competitiveness – some of the key values of the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 project.
“This award means a great deal to me, more so because there are few recognitions in Finland for personal achievement in industry,” Stenros comments.
Stenros’s list of achievements speaks for itself. They include several positions of trust in Finland and within the EU in which she promotes design and innovation with futuristic vision. Her major achievement is building corporate success based on design at KONE, the Finnish elevators and escalators giant that ranks among the top companies in the world in its field and stands as one of the most successful Finnish companies operating on the global arena. Stenros has served as KONE’s design director for the past eight years.
KONE at the cutting edge
“When I started as KONE’s design director in late 2005, my team including myself was 1.5 people,” Stenros says. Now the in-house team is the size of a mid-sized design agency, half of them in Shanghai, and KONE contracts an equal number of designers outside the company. Design is one of the three strategic spearheads of KONE’s research & development, besides eco-efficiency and ride comfort.
The change that Stenros has helped to effect at KONE over the years is evident in a number of ways. “We are today far more end-user oriented, paying attention to the end user’s emotional experience of the elevator,” Stenros explains.
“An elevator is an architectural space and a dramatic public space, rather than a tool,” she continues, “and every aspect has an effect on the user experience.”
Much of the KONE design team’s work has to do with interpreting trends in various parts of the world, reading weak signals and, ultimately, understanding where the world is going. “A crucial part of our work is proactively envisioning the user experience of the future.”
Stenros came to the strong engineering corporate culture of KONE from the design world, having led the Hong Kong Design Centre for one year and, previously, Design Forum Finland for nine years. Building design into such a strong pillar of the business was no small task.
“I came here with a strong vision, but the difficulty of incorporating design into a corporate environment is how to formulate the vision. Entering the powerful engineering culture at KONE, I needed to build a set of hard arguments.” She built a formula of design research incorporating a trend analysis tool. Her team builds scenarios and works with personas, that is, imaginary people.
“Design has good space here at KONE,” Stenros affirms. “I haven’t had to compromise on my overall vision. I’m happy about the corporate leaders’ intellectual courage here.”
Designers needed in corporate management
KONE’s design vision set apart, Stenros voices concern about the role of design in Finnish industry in general.
“There was lively discussion about design within Finnish industry in the 1990’s. At the end of the decade, Nokia turned design into a powerful success factor. Finnish forest machines became design products. But since the beginning of the 2000’s, the trend has been downward, and design directors have become fewer and fewer in Finnish companies.
“Finnish companies should now quickly hire in-house designers at strategic levels and build design into one of their core competencies. Designers could open strategically important new vistas in companies. Without utilizing design, how can Finnish companies compete on the global arena with others that do utilize design?”
Stenros announces an urgent message, “What’s at stake is Finnish companies’ competitiveness and the competitiveness of Finnish industry as a whole.”
Breaking through the glass ceiling
Anne Stenros had an ambitious dream as a young woman: she wanted to become Finland’s first university professor in architectural theory. The pursuit of the dream took her to study architecture at the University of Oulu in Finland and the University of California Berkeley, and further to take a doctoral degree from the Helsinki University of Technology (today Aalto University) in 1992.
“Then I ran into a glass ceiling and glass walls,” Stenros says explaining why she did not achieve her dream – there was no place or path for her in the male-dominated and practice-oriented field of architecture.
After a stint at her father’s architectural firm, she made the easy transition to design and became Director of Design Forum Finland in 1995. In 2004, she was recruited as Director of the Hong Kong Design Centre but was almost immediately redirected to KONE, which was looking for a design director. The rest, and the way she broke the glass ceiling in corporate Finland, is history.
With the same passion as Stenros speaks about the role of design at strategic levels in Finnish industry, she speaks about the unacceptably low percentages of women in leadership roles in technical fields: “Technical fields, including industrial design, employ far too few women. This distorts the fields and corporate competitiveness. Women should have a much larger presence in these fields, because women form a growing body of end users and, as consumers, they more and more often make the purchasing decisions. Diversity benefits everybody.”
Stenros adds, “What company can attain or maintain leadership if they ignore 50 percent of the available talent, that is, women?”