Week 6/2010

This week has mostly been about prototyping, collaboration and presentations. We started the week off with show & tell presentations of more of our prototypes. Sauli had designed an interactive school desk, for which we started to dream up some extra iPad features. Panu taught others the secrets of interactive wireframes and I demonstrated my Twittering Arduino project. This is fun stuff and we can totally see why Google is giving Skunkworks time to their workers. It keeps a designer’s (and programmer’s) mind fresh.

HUB Helsinki

In the collaboration front we went to see the action at HUB Helsinki this Wednesday. That was a really inspiring environment for collaborating on any problem or design issue. They have a nice spacious place at Aleksanterinkatu 16-18, i.e. in downtown Helsinki. The evening session consisted of collaborating on four projects the participants had brought up. These projects included thinking about use cases for an acceleration detecting light device, space concerns of a peer-to-peer renting service, redesigning the Sitra website, and innovating around distribution issues of local organic food. A good crowd, good ideas and a nice buzz.

In fact, visitors were encouraged to go to work in the HUB space during both day and evening time. We were totally over this idea immediately and are going to bring a design team to work there on some non-secret project. Interviewing random people about their habits and digging new ideas out of them is going to be interesting! Similarly, we will be there to help any of you in your projects if we can. It’s gonna be fun, we’ll just have to find a nice time slot to do that. Read more about the HUB at HUB Helsinki’s website.

Prototyping

Our concept of Prototyping Fridays is spreading. We’re soon planning expanding this idea to HUB Helsinki. This means that a bigger open crowd could work on things and build prototypes together. This could be hardware, software, clothing, knitting, whatever! More info about that when things progress.

Hiring

The hiring process is still in process. Interviews continue with promising and varied candidates.

Work

Previous projects continue normally from process phase to the next, with other people continuing from the work of others. Nothing too special there. Few interesting unmentioned projects this week include an e-commerce service for city & building scale architectural & technical blueprints. Also big huge pitch was worked on by about half of the personnel. A good group effort.

Matti’s been trying to find us a bigger new studio space with Sami. If you know of any free & hot factory style spaces, please let us know. Matti’s also been using a ancient technology called ‘a fax’ to organize some business stuff.

I worked with Matti to bridge together two projects and presented the results on Friday. A fun meeting with maybe the funniest clients ever. I addition to that I continued with Sami on that service ecosystem project. It seems I’ll be moving to an on-site mode for parts of next weeks to ensure nice transition from Alpha to Beta in close cooperation with the client and the agile team.

Petri has been involved in designing media corporation website together with Matti. He also delved into the world of decision making through research study and customer psychology literature.

Believe or not, our own website is on a long road to being updated in the future again. The stakes are high as our current site has been so well received in Finland and in the design community at large. Thanks for that. Currently the new site is having its IA and big picture designed by Sauli & Sami.

Sauli also worked on a teenager education collaterals for a famous Finnish actress and continued with the banking design with Panu & Aki. They’re keeping themselves busy with a tight agile process with the software house.

During this week we finally we found some time to work on the finalizing the concept and visual identity for a the transformation project targeting the content industry and it’s consumers. This is something that got Sami rather excited about this week. It’s really nice to see the base laid within the last year to fold out into concrete actions.

Our partners-in-crime, Henrik W. and Kennel, are doing a kick ass job with the individual bits and bops of phase one, while Antti I. is providing the communication services and keeping the client happy.

Other things related to this— we found an opportunity to work some interesting information graphics and dataviz into the equation. Next week will be a major pivot on how this will roll out later in the year. We also feel now is the right time to do this. Last year would’ve been too early, but now the zeitgeist is on our side. Exciting stuff.