Former Space10 head Kaave Pour has launched a new venture tackling the challenges facing Europe, at a time when Europe’s challenges seem greater by the day. In this interview, he tells Dezeen about 21st Europe’s mission and its first project, a concept for high-speed rail.
After shuttering IKEA-linked innovation lab Space10 with his co-founders in 2023, Pour launched 21st Europe as a design-focused think tank at the start of this year, with the goal of championing creative long-term strategies to drive the continent forward in areas like infrastructure, clean energy and human wellbeing.
Since then, the prospects of a trade war with the USA and a real war with Russia have thrown Europe into a state of alarm. But even as governments slash welfare budgets to spend on defence, Pour is convinced that it is the right time for 21st Europe’s aspirational, investment-heavy vision.
“We think design is one of the most vital domains to solve the crossroads Europe is in today,” said Pour. “I decided to really push the button and launch 21st Europe faster than expected after the election in the US.”
“Doing these things just a year ago felt like a stretch and now, given everything happening, it feels undeniably necessary.”
21st Europe attempts to “give some direction of where we’re going next”
Pour’s vision is that design can improve the research and policy work usually done by think tanks, which he sees as having become “very boring and very disconnected from people”.
“Our analysis is that Europe has for too long been way too short-term in their thinking and investment versus other regions,” he said. “Hopefully design can play a role in helping them understand that.”
Design has two functions at 21st Europe, he says: one is in visual communication, translating what could otherwise be dry policy proposals into compelling renderings that have a chance of igniting the public imagination.
The other is at the very core of the project, as the company explores the design of systems and structures for a healthy society.
“The last couple of decades, design has really been leveraged by the economic boom that has been happening, where a lot of design studios have gained traction by designing new products and new campaigns or advertising,” Pour said. “But I think in times of geopolitical crisis, design becomes more systemic and public-oriented.”
“The practice of simplifying complexity or creating direction or storytelling will be applied elsewhere during war, for example, than during peacetime,” he continued. “In this new friction in Europe, I think design will play a more important role in distilling what is wrong, but more importantly, trying to give some direction of where we’re going next.”
In terms of visual communication, Pour observes that organisations on both the far left and right sides of the political spectrum have used graphic design to their advantage, with campaigns that have gotten a message across and grown their supporter base.
“That is, I think, a problem, because there will be this silent majority who actually represent the vast majority of opinions in a society who will become more and more silenced, because we communicate in a way that doesn’t resonate,” said Pour.
He hopes that 21st Europe’s visually appealing reports – or “blueprints”, as the think tank calls them – can claw back some of that lost ground for the centre.
Starline puts focus on “the experience of travel”
21st Europe’s first blueprint, launched this week, is called Starline, and it is a vision for a transcontinental high-speed train network.
Developed with design studios Bakken & Bæck and Culte Commun, the visualisations show a sleek bullet train in EU-flag blue – the colour chosen for its potential to make an iconic trifecta with the red of London buses and the yellow of New York cabs – as well as a colour-coded network map that makes the continent look as easy to cross as a city, and welcoming carriages characterised by large windows and soft curves.
The experience would be “unified” and “intuitive”, Pour says, with an open ticketing system that would make it possible to book tickets across companies and nations from a single website, as with plane journeys, and purpose-built stations giving each nation’s star architects and designers a chance to “show off a bit” by creating a new landmark.
With trains moving at 300 to 400 kilometres per hour, travel time from Helsinki to Berlin would be cut to just over three hours, and after being built in stages, the network would stretch from Oslo to Istanbul, and Lisbon to Kyiv.
In terms of implementation, 21st Europe suggests that Starline should be publicly funded and privately operated, and overseen by a new rail authority within the EU framework.
Starline is not intended to be revolutionary – it builds on existing national high-speed rail lines and the European Union’s Trans-European Transport (TEN-T) network, an initiative that Pour says is good but “mostly focused on where the rails should be laid”.
He believes that building a successful high-speed network – one that can boost the economy and transform lifestyles the way China’s has, for instance – means thinking more ambitiously about a cohesive system.
“It’s not just about the rails but about the experience of travel that is important for Europe to solve – how to find tickets, how to go to the station, what will these trains look like,” said Pour.
“We should use these new mega initiatives to not just put rails on the ground but actually design things that can transcend into culture and become a reference that a citizen can understand and relate to.”
He also doesn’t want the American focus on cars to become the dominant framework for thinking about the future of transport.
“Unfortunately today most people look at a Cybertruck as if it’s some sort of wonder from the future,” he said. “My view is that it’s the perfect picture of what we don’t want to have in our world, which is this Blade Runner, dystopian, masculine vision where we live in our own little bubble.”
“The ones imagining the future end up shaping it,” he added.
Space10 ended with change in thinking about innovation
Space10 ended in 2023, Pour says, because both the studio’s founders and IKEA felt that after 10 years of collaboration, it was time for something different.
“When we started, no one talked about innovation,” said Pour. “And I think when we stopped, there were innovation teams in every single unit across the company. I think also the whole world has moved a bit away from these innovation labs to something that maybe feels more embedded into the teams who can realise them.”
He says his new project, also based in Copenhagen, shares some DNA with Space10 – both “bring things out in the open way before they may be feasible”, with the goal of engaging primarily the design industry and students.
“They are the ones who actually influence how most things are made and thought of in today’s society,” said Pour.
Pour is self-funding 21st Europe and desires that it remain independent of corporations or other interests. Blueprints that are pencilled in for the coming months include one on “play” and childhood, one on the role of nuclear energy and one on a new “Made in Europe” mark.
There is also a blueprint planned on defence – although despite the current political circumstances, he does not feel inclined to bring it forward from its scheduled place in 2026. His priority is to push European leaders to think beyond reflexive, short-term decision-making.
“This is a scary time, it’s a defining time,” he said. “But it’s super important that we don’t go out and spend all our money on a defence initiative and leave all of the investment in social fabric behind.”
“Because if we don’t have a cohesive society, these wars will not just be external, they will also not just be culture wars, but there will be a lot of fragmentation and polarisation and conflict within Europe because of inequality and because of lack of investment in our future,” he continued.
“It’s important that we use this crisis to reinvent ourselves for not just the next decade, but for the next century.”
The images are courtesy of 21st Europe.
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