True North Never Moved

Celebrating 90 Years of Suunto

Almost everyone who runs or climbs owns a watch on their wrist that tells them more than the time. Fewer people could tell you where any of that technology actually came from – what it was built to solve before it ever measured a mile.

Right now, in Chamonix, hundreds of watches are doing exactly the job they were built for – logging vert, tracking a heartbeat through the night, telling someone exactly how much further there is to go.

A few hundred meters away sits the Suunto exhibition From Depths to Heights, ninety years of that same lineage.

Curated by Werneri Vanhanen and the Garbadura Collective, the exhibition pulls together objects spanning all ninety years — some shown publicly for the first time, alongside the catalogs, photography and footage that surrounded them.

At what point does a tool stop being a tool, and start to carry meaning instead?

“I wanted to first understand the archive as a whole. I went through it piece by piece, looking at the products, [...] and all the material around them. Then I let that first discovery phase settle and started researching beyond the archive to understand the wider cultural and technological context," says Werneri Vanhanen, curator of From Depths to Heights.

“I also spoke with Suunto employees and people from my own network who had knowledge of different parts of the story. [...] With 90 years of history, you need multiple perspectives to understand what really matters.”

“For me, an object becomes really interesting when you understand not just what it is, but why it existed, who used it, and what was happening around it.”

Ninety years is a long time to ask that question, but it isn’t really a timeline so much as thousands of individual objects, most of which will never leave storage, sitting in an archive that was never built to be seen by anyone outside the company. Somebody has to comb through it all and decide what’s worth putting in the light.

We spoke with Werneri about that process, and about what happens to an instrument once it stops being used and starts being looked at, instead.

True North has never moved. Everything around it does.

In 1936, Finnish inventor Tuomas Vohlonen built a compass filled with liquid, dense enough to hold the needle steady in conditions that would render a dry compass useless. It wasn’t the first compass ever made, but it was, by most accounts, the first one that could withstand Finland’s perilous winters. That compass became the single object everything else at Suunto was eventually built atop.

Since then, the same company built the world’s first watch-sized dive computer in 1997. An altimeter, a barometer, and a compass in a single wrist instrument arrived the year after that. GPS watches came later, binding it all together, plus several dozen more features that allowed the brand to completely evolve its tools, generation after generation. However, Werneri says that functionality remains their North Star.

“Suunto has shaped outdoor culture, design, technology and daily adventures for nearly a century, but the fundamental question has remained surprisingly consistent: how do you give people the right information to understand where they are, where they're going and what conditions they're facing?”

“There's a very Finnish way of thinking behind that: start with the real need, solve the problem properly, and don't add something just for the sake of adding it. Technology will continue to change, but I think that clarity of purpose is something Suunto has managed to carry through all these decades.”

An altimeter was never designed with an aesthetics-first mentality. It needed to survive a dive – that was its sole purpose.

“I don't think it ever stops being a tool,” Werneri says. “These instruments are made to be used. They are taken to the depths of oceans, to the highest peaks, across forests, into competitions and into everyday adventures. And that is where they accumulate meaning.”

“One of the most powerful examples in the exhibition is the M-311 compass with the bullet hole in it. In 1939, during the early years of Suunto and the Winter War, a Finnish soldier was carrying a Suunto compass when a bullet struck it. The compass stopped the bullet and saved his life. The object is still here today.”

The archive manifests itself as a physical space in Chamonix that people walk into and feel the history, rather than just read about it.

“There is something that happens when you encounter these objects physically that you simply don't get from a timeline or a digital archive,” Werneri says.

“In a world where almost everything is immediately available online, there is something increasingly valuable about slowing down and physically encountering an object from another era.”

With UTMB kicking off this week, it’s one of, if not the, defining races in the sport – and one that’s grown, in recent years, from something built for elite mountain athletes into a more mass-participation base. That slight shift raises a question about whether “adventure” still means what it meant when Suunto was founded – expedition gear, built for a narrower, more extreme version of adventure than most people take on today.

“I think adventure has actually become more interesting because it no longer has to mean one particular type of extreme achievement,” Werneri says.

“It can be an 8000-metre expedition, but it can also be running a new trail before work, taking a different route home, going somewhere you've never been before, or simply spending a day outside without knowing exactly what you will encounter.”

“For me, adventure is therefore much more about mindset than scale. It is curiosity, movement and the willingness to step outside what is familiar.”

A technical brand’s archive is usually just an internal reference tool. It’s not something the public normally gets near. 

“I think it makes the history more alive,” Werneri says. “If [an archive] remains hidden, its potential is limited. Once you open it up, other people can bring their own perspectives to it – designers, athletes, collectors, researchers, younger generations and people who may never have encountered Suunto before.”

Ninety years in, the question for any brand carrying this much history isn’t whether the archive is worth having. It’s what to do with it next – repeat what has already worked, or build something new on top of it.

“I don't think the answer is to choose between heritage and innovation,” Werneri says. “The interesting thing is when heritage becomes a foundation for innovation rather than a limitation on it.”

We put the question to him in reverse – not what from the past has earned its place in a case, but what from right now might, ninety years on.

“Hopefully, the things that have a story behind them,” Vanhanen says.

“I don't think it will necessarily be the most technologically advanced object that survives. Technology changes too quickly for that. The things that become artefacts are the objects that tell us something about how people lived, what they valued, what they were trying to achieve and how they interacted with the world around them.”

“I would hope the objects tell future generations something about our relationship with nature, technology and exploration — and perhaps make them curious enough to ask what came next.”

Words by Christina Lai

Images courtesy of Suunto Archive / Phillip Reiter