As promised a while ago, we thought it would be useful to share the more long term thinking and work that goes into running and developing a design consultancy. In this series myself and other founding partners will be reflecting the past two and a half years, things we’ve learned and also about the [...]
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(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.)
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 [...]
Short weeknote this time around.
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 [...]
Forum Virium held a nice event this morning. It was about service design for urban media and embedded design, especially in relation to the recent selection of Helsinki as the World Design Capital 2012. I presented about urban screens. My presentation is attached here with English notes.
Urban Screens
View more presentations from Teppo Kotirinta.
Presentation schedule
Helsinki Design [...]
On this weeknote; a guest editor, and a few happy events.
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 week of sharing and preparing for it.
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 [...]
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 [...]
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(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.)
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 [...]
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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 [...]
After last week’s weeknote we got excited and started thinking more about how to actually produce these reflections more easily. Our weekly status meeting on Monday was spent mostly mulling around this issue. We came up with a easy point based workload estimation concept which we will hopefully build into an actual web service soon. [...]
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After a long wait, the Apple tablet saw the light of the day today. We at Nordkapp are as excited as you are, and here’s a few thoughts on what this might be all about;
The new old media
One of the most obvious uses for this is naturally the “old” media and the publishing industry. I am [...]
“Weeknotes are updates about what your business has been doing over the past seven days or so. They’re about reflecting on your work, your achievements, and what’s on deck.”
In order to fulfill our promise of transparency, we here at Nordkapp are participating in the idea of Weeknotes. This thing was most likely started by Schulze [...]
In order to respond to growing demand and to serve our clients better, we are looking to recruit a middleweight / senior designer, with a strong visual / interaction design focus.
Your Background
Ideally, the person we are looking for is someone who is, by nature, very comfortable with social and digital media. A digital native, if [...]
Here are some of the themes we think will either finally make their way into mainstream or are there, and keep on on getting stronger in 2010. Tell us what you think in the comments.
1. Design as a process
In 2006, the UK’s Design Council published their seminal paper on Transformation Design. Somehow things kept bubbling [...]
Nordkapp was proud to provide its office for the venue for BarCampHelsinkiIV. About 40 people stopped by during the day and there was about 15-20 people present all the time.
We had plenty of arduino boards and components to check out thanks to Aleksi, @sivulainen and robomaa.com. Actual hacking didn’t happen too much but at least [...]
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Here’s the presentation I gave for the annual Project Managers’s Club seminar at Aalto University Design Factory on 25.11.
My intention was to share a point of view from designers’ perspective, and especially on what makes design organizations tick. It was a honor to be invited to give a point of view, as other speakers included [...]
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(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.)
Watercolor paintings and oil paintings look no doubt quite different. The artist had a vision about the desired end result and then selected the painting technique that is best suited to reach it. In any form of art or craft, the tool is always visible in the [...]
(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.)
Demos are great for many purposes. The most obvious ones are to communicate the design to someone else, and test the UI with end users. However, in a large design project, the less obvious purposes may be the most important ones.
A demo or a simulation is [...]
(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.)
Agile software methodologies were developed for creating small software applications for company internal use. The process was intended for small software teams. Most certainly, no user experience folks were involved. Anyway, software developer is UI designer’s best friend. If agile makes them perform and feel better, it [...]
There’s a saying that people come to our lives for a reason, a season or a lifetime. It’s my time to move on. I have been fortunate to have the amazing people at Nordkapp in my life for last year and four months. It’s mind boggling to think how far we have come with the company.
Read more »More Cowbell:
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