Week 5/2010

Interesting week behind us again. Projects continue normally and some good new pitches were thrown in for good measure. Looks like 2010 is going to be a pretty interesting year, both work- and growth wise.

Our endeavors towards transformation design are taking off as well— the in-house design process we use formed the base for us and a major player in business strategy & communication design to deliver a large proposal for a huge digital driven service on Friday. This will also potentially mark a beginning of a remarkable partnership for us which makes things even more exciting.

Sub-projects for two big clients of us were wrapped up together by two respective teams. The aim in both is the same: organize ideas and directions from weeks or months of work into a coherent whole. One project is fully done for now, while the other one continues straight into wireframes and graphics fairly quickly, starting next week. These have kept Petri, Panu, Matti and me quite busy.

That service ecosystem project I’ve been talking about has now entered Alpha state, closed launch with test people coming up next week. We’ll dive into user’s feedback and discuss potential changes to the system later in the week. Meanwhile we’re already looking for best ways to do features of the upcoming Beta version.

Matti met with interesting people who might want us to design both physical and digital interactions for a real, industrial hardware-based product. Now we’re talking! What’s cool, this is a lead we got from that Growth Coaching thing last year.

Aki had his hands full with several off our projects. The most interesting (and public) of these is probably the HSL public transport data -related prototype mentioned earlier. Works like a charm on iPhone/iTouch browser. We can’t wait to try this out iPad.

In the banking project Panu, Sauli & Sami are working on, the first stage concept exploration is done and the natural next step is to explore the visualization of personal economy a bit further, while our programming partner starts to work on the heavy backend stuff.

We were also invited to present at a Forum Virium event on the topic of urban screens and Helsinki Design Capital 2012, which is nice. We’ve got Sami holding a seat on the steering group as well.

Hiring

Recruitment continues as planned. First people have been called for talks and few more are still to be called. So don’t panic yet. Best candidates were already discussed in this week’s board meeting. We’ll just have to find time to see the most suitable of you all.

Music

An ancient pitch regarding the content industry and copyrights is finally moving on as well. Everything is approved, and the first bits were shot by Teemu & Kennel Helsinki this week. All this coincided with the Emma Gaala – the Finnish grammies – on Thursday. The visual id and the website is something we’ve done for the second year in the row now, and naturally we again had a participant group in the awards itself. The vibes were good again this year, and it seems the Finnish pop music scene is actually quite vibrant nowadays which is fun. Congrats for the lovely ladies Chisu, Anna Puu & PMMP who cleared the table this year!