The 2012 World Championship aims to be the best-designed tournament in history, as the tournament organization joins forces with the Helsinki World Design Capital organization.

This is a unique opportunity, said General Secretary Mika Sulin in a press conference in Bratislava during the 2011 tournament.

- It’s not only a question of what the event will look like, design is much more than that. Design touches everything in and around the tournament, he said.

Finland is famous for its design, and has been for decades. “Design is about guiding people and managing the experience. At the World Championship, it covers the players, the rinks, the arenas, the fan events, arena services, and how people meet them,” says Pekka Timonen, director at the World Design Capital organization.

Of course, one of the most visible things, probably the most visible one, is the tournament’s look and feel. According to Mika Sulin, the goal is to create a design platform that can easily cover the two World Championships played in Finland in 2012 and 2013 as Finland co-hosts them with Sweden.

- We’d like to have a look that can then be tweaked for the 2013 tournament, so that it still feels fresh, he says.

Timonen also mentions crowd sourcing and data mining as another new ways to improve the user experience.

- Helsinki’s theme in its World Design Capital year 2012 is Open Helsinki – Embedded Design. One of that aspects of that is sharing of information. Hockey games create a lot of data, and if we release it people to use, the nerds out there will surely turn it into fascinating presentations. That’s an opportunity we haven’t seen used in sports that much, he says.