At the moment of writing, we’ve been working on Nordkapp for exactly 950 days now, plus a few months of planning and preparations. Roughly a thousand days. Something that I am quite proud of is that apart from the daily craft of design, we’ve seen one massive economic downturn and still managed to actually keep on sustainable growth since the day one. Not bad from a bunch of designers still learning how to run a business.

Which leads me to this—If I were to pick one thing we’ve learned during the first thousand days, it is that the only constant is, and will be Change. Things will change, and they will change faster than you’d think. The peculiar aspect of this change is, that it’s quite hard to resist— when the industries, and the world around you is in flux, you have two options—either adapt and evolve, or get left behind. This is something that seems to happen on all scales as well, from micro to macro.

So, how does one adapt to this constant change? Like said, there are roughly put two basic options—either accept your vulnerability and start navigating by a good mix of reason and intuition, or start building walls around you to protect the status quo. By now, you should probably be aware that the last option will work only for so long (hello old content industries) as you’ve got likeminded clients and cash in the bank.

To be more specific, what I believe is the key to survival in the times like this is to embrace the insecurity, and constantly remind yourself of the possibilities instead of threats. Sounds simple, and pretty much is. Keep your spirits up, and your glass half filled. Have faith in what you do, because as they say, if you believe in nothing you will fall for anything.

Of course, there’s more than meets the eye here. For example, keeping up with the change is fairly time and resource intensive for any single individual to cope with, and this has its own reflections on the way businesses should run.

*****

In the following weeks, I’ll be sharing a few observations on how this all affects the way we run our business, process and methodologies. I hope this will help other people avoid some of the pitfalls we’ve been through, and possibly even encourage more people to start following their heart and do things their own way, just because they can.

Meanwhile, I want you to consider the following; As designers, our job is not just the craft itself. Instead, it’s more and more about helping our clients to envision and invent their possible futures, to plan and prepare for the evolving environment, beyond just art, business and technology. As creative minds, we possess the knowledge and skills to make the intangible concrete. We are storytellers, the catalysts, the sense makers and the agents of Change. For the most part, the future is being made of right here, right now. Be brave, be part of it.. and enjoy the ride.

How should the teams for design be built? There are thousands of handbooks how to build effective teams, so let’s not get into the generics. There’s one specific aspect of design teamwork that I would like to emphasize, and that is the collaboration of interaction design and visual design.

I may have mentioned before, that in a process where interaction designer creates wireframes and then hands them over to a visual designer for decoration, the result often is — decorated boxes. Creating something more, something that is novel, meaningful, effective, fluid, dynamic, alive, and mesmerizing, will require very close cooperation between interaction design and visual design. The boundaries between disciplines are the surfaces where the most communication problems arise, but – I claim – that also the magic happens.

The best designs are such where ingenious interaction design meets ingenious visual design. Therefore my optimal team setup would be such that there are always one interaction designer paired with one visual designer. (This is not unlike the AD + copy pairing so common in advertising industry.) They both need to understand and respect each others work, and get along very well otherwise too. When I see this connection in action, when I overhear these designers sitting side by side and arguing and developing ideas together, I know that we are doing something that very few design studios can.

I’m back from the holidays to a fast week. We are learning new right and wrong challenging ways of doing things from various requirements our projects are bringing us. An example of a challenge is to organize management structure so that decision making takes 3 days and the work must be done in 2. I’m getting a feeling these things are going to be in a presentation/study/blog post one day.

Speaking of presentations, I gave a presentation about Urban Screens in a Helsinki World Design Capital 2012 event by Forum Virium. The point of the presentation was to show some ideas that came about during our research on earlier project dealing with street level touch screens. You can see the presentation in the previous post. The research involved pretty much everybody in the company some time ago. Sami & Sauli helped me narrow the data to a concise presentation.

The hiring process is still going on but a first decision has already been made about an internship. Some people realized they might not have the work experience for a full designer position yet, but applied for an internship instead. That’s clever.

One of these clever people will join us on the 22nd. More about that then. The actual Designer title is currently a battle of suitability between just few finalists. We’d love to get all of them.

On the work front everybody’s quite busy but excited about new projects at the same time. Matti, Sami, Petri, Aki, Sauli, Panu & Ilkka: I need to call you out, you’re doing a good job all of you! And our freelancers, thanks for being so pro.

Until next week, fellow humans.

Presentation schedule

Helsinki Design Capital 2012 – Palvelumuotoilu kaupunkimediassa

9.00 Welcome, Esa Blomberg & Helena Hyvärinen

9.10 4 things to remember when designing service interactions Anton Schubert, 358

9.30 Miten palvelumuotoilu luo mahdollisuuksia kaupunkiympäristössä Mikko Koivisto, Yatta

9.50 Palvelumuotoilussa oli avaimet voittoon: Forum Virium Helsinki ja WDC (world design capital 2012)

10.10 case I, Mikko Jäppinen, Palmu inc

10.20 case II, Teppo Kotirinta, Nordkapp

As Teppo is enjoying his holiday this week, I promised to keep the weeknotes rolling. It’s been quite exciting week. As mentioned last week, we won a major new client on Friday. This week was spent on organizing the first phase and with bit of a resource juggling to keep things smooth for all our projects. Internally, the new project will be called Oslo and we’ve got Matti as project lead, and Panu, Teppo and myself in the project team itself.

Another notable thing is that we secured ourselves a new, bigger and better office space this week. We’ll reveal the location a bit later but in any case we will have more than double the space, and in an excellent seaside location. The girls of Lillehammer are working on the space already and looks like it’s going to be quite a sweet sweet space. Finding the near-perfect space happened way sooner than we knew to expect, and this was a pleasant surprise of course. This also opens up some exciting possibilities for our current location, which we naturally let you know as soon we have a confirmation in our hands.

Other projects are rolling on nicely. Petri, Matti and myself did a quick visual exploration a for the service ecosystem we’ve been working on for a while. Along with Ilkka, Matti has been quite involved on mapping out the practicalities on Oslo. Like Teppo’s mentioned before, we are constantly looking for ways to improve our internal methods and ways of working, so this project is also a big step ahead as we intend to roll out a project team model we’ve been figuring out for a while. This is one of the valuable insights we got from the business development workshop with IDEO last November, and it will be interesting to see how it all pans out.

Despite Panu being on a holiday, the banking project we’ve been working on is progressing nicely as well. Aki has done a tremendous amount of work with Sauli on the service prototype, and Ilkka and myself did another iteration of the risk management tool with the client. That one is shaping up quite nicely as well.

And last, everyone involved in the content industry transformation project are making sure the end results are kicking ass and taking names on all fronts. We had a film- and a photoshoot this week, and are about to see the drafts of the phase one next week. Coming to Youtube near you soon as well.

For the rest of the crew it seems like business as usual. Things rolling on smoothly, a few large projects coming to closure and maybe even public, and few others about to begin. And what comes to recruiting the designer(s) we dearly need, we are finally making decisions next week. We’ll let you know— until then, good night… and good luck.

Work

We won a big pitch this week. A tight battle against good competition. We are getting more and more confident that what we are doing is the right thing at the right time.

Other projects continued normally from last week. A big cross-company team will organize itself for the aforementioned new project already next week.

IxDA Helsinki February

IxDA Helsinki February was held this thursday at Hammerkit, and organized by Miemo P., Henrik R., Ville T. and Norkapp’s Sami. Nice people and lively discussions on emotional design. Next IxDAs are at Sulake in March and Fjord in April.

Thesis

Petri finished his final thesis called ‘Design Thinking — How to leap from product and brand design into creative organization culture’. This study is a part of International Design Business Management training by TAIK & HSE and Lahti University on Technology. Nordkapp congratulates Petri immensely!

Holidays, sickness and upcoming presentation

It’s winter holiday season in Finland. Ilkka and Panu are currently enjoying theirs.

Sadly Aki got a bug and has been quite sick this week. We all hope he gets better soon (and doesn’t try to work while on sick leave!).

I’m going to have my holiday next week, so I ‘m not going to have much to talk about after that. But the week after next I will, as I’m presenting about urban screens at an event about embedded design and Helsinki Design Capital 2012. The content for that presentation will be worked out as a team of Sauli, Sami and me, as we all seem to have so much to say about this topic.

Hiring

The meticulous hiring process continued with few more interviews. Few more to come and then we should be able to start deciding things.

Space

We might have found our new space. More than double the current size and much more opportunities for group work. Matti & Sami went to check it out on Friday. It would need some interior design but that’s not a problem for our posse. Let’s see what we decide about that.

UX Lx: User Experience Lisbon

It seems that this year a good bunch of Nordkappers is heading to UX Lx conference in Lisbon, Portugal.

The programme seems very good as it already includes many industry heavy weights like Dan Saffer and Jared Spool, not to mention some legends like Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen TBA.

What’s even cooler, is that our Sami is giving a presentation on the first day called “Designing Agile Interactions”. Like that wasn’t enough, our Panu is giving another presentation on the third day called “Interaction Design Leadership: Lessons Learned”.

It seems that it’s going to be an amazing conference. We hope to see as many of you there as possible!

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.

Mikko Franck, a respected Finnish conductor, was asked to help out and rehearse with an amateur orchestra for a full weekend. He arrived at the site, and just for a trial started to conduct the first composition. The musicians in the orchestra didn’t play particularly well. In fact, they struggled to keep in their tunes. After a few bars he put his baton down and said: “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you”, and walked out.

I’m not 100% sure that this is a true story. Nevertheless, if it weren’t, it wouldn’t make the point of the story any less clear. Just like the orchestra conductor, you as a design lead you should concentrate in the big picture and the nuances of the details that make designs perfect. If the basic skills of the designers that you work with are not there, it will take a lot from your time to simply teach people how to design.

As discussed earlier in this series, you will need a lot of raw material from the designers, based on which you can steer the project. In addition to being able to create solid designs and creative solutions (preferably better than you ever could), the designers must master the basic tools and able to express themselves verbally and visually, and be great communicators. Only then they will be efficiently provide the raw material for you that you need so that you can orchestrate the design.

Naturally, there will be different designers that you will have the chance to work with. Some will be less, some more experienced. You must coach new designers to be part of the team. But don’t let that take all your time.

PS. Sorry for the long gap between #10 and #11. Been busy with fascinating projects – and also the series is now starting to discuss issues with people so maybe I’m subconsciously postponing these as it’s difficult to stay politically correct.

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!

Much of the projects have remained the same since last week and continue normally so I won’t go too much into those anymore. Something was also completed though. Namely that online news concept Matti was working on last week. He finished it with Sauli and it’s now wireframed, presented and accepted by the client. It’s actually pretty cool. For once a client has the balls to build something new in this space. Imagine all those cool news projects you’ve seen somebody hack up in the web – this is something like those but for an actual client.

Panu’s been wrapping up a concept and the presentation on a highly complex project. He feels that this is a starting point for truly integrated communication. He’s also been roadmapping how a TV station optimally appears in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th screen.

Petri’s still been adding final design bits to several web sites and services. He’s soon starting on a new service design project that groups together several sub-concepts done previously by various teams at Nordkapp. This is potentially an upside down way to do this but sometimes the realities of business make it so.

Me and Sami continued on that prototype and discussed at length about some of the limitations of prototyping itself. For example that it cannot really specify certain things clearly enough and that there’s still a need for a design doc to supplement a prototype. Sami also wrote a blog post about that Apple Tablet we were waiting for last week.

Ilkka has been making proposals like crazy, of which more about later in this weeknote.

The internal values & culture -workshop went down pretty well too. All hands in, and lots of talking and mapping of things to develop, and even a concrete list of action points.

Hiring

Just a reminder, our designer hunt is still ongoing. There’s two more days to apply. Applications have been pouring in during the last days and it’s going to be hard to select people for interviews. Me and Sami will be looking into that once the application deadline passes this weekend. You who have already applied, hang on tight for just a little longer!

Winter party

We held a winter party on Thursday. It was a nice turnaround of clients and some friends too. Very interesting discussions and lotsa laughter all night long. Organizing the party was quite a big group effort again as we like to have things pretty and cozy for the people who take the time to visit. Most of the work was done by Petri and especially the girls of Lillehammer, our sister company. They are just amazing with everything related to spaces. Big thanks to them! UPDATE: Photos in Flickr!

Prototype Friday and Pitches

It seems that we tried to take a bit too big initial bite with our Prototype Friday concept. We got suddenly invited to pitch for so many projects with so quick timetables that the Friday turned a bit too busy. Still Aki looked into geo location in mobile Safari and HSL’s public transportation route API. Let’s see what comes of that. To give others us a little more breathing time we decided to continue prototyping over the weekend. Everybody presents their stuff in the weekly meeting on Monday.

Those pitches are several big and visible media corp. projects and a cool interactive space related to Helsinki’s Design Capital 2012 project. Ilkka is running the show with these proposals and the rest of us help him with our knowledge. We are totally stoked to be involved in these. Let’s see what happens next week.