Weeknote #625: Hello autumn!
Rainy but warm September is here and we at Nordkapp have been keeping our eyes on the future. Over the past week we have unveiled our new core offering to the public and attended the inaugural Joint Futures conference. This Friday we‘re happy to host a discussion about ethics in work life at Nordkapp Academy.
Nordkapp in a nutshell
We have been working hard in recent months to crystalize what we offer to our clients. We published our new core offering to the public last week.
Nordkapp is a strategic design and innovation consultancy. With our clients we discover new, meaningful growth opportunities in future trends and technology. It’s what we call futures thinking, doing and learning.
We open this up this more on our website, go and check it out!
Back to the future
A group of us attended the 2-day Joint Futures design conference in Ruoholahti, Helsinki. It was a continuation of the last years’ DS CONF organized by telecom operator Elisa and partners, which was in the past about DesingOps and design systems for better services.
This year the conference had more holistic approach towards design, and there were talks from selling the value of design to current trends in the profession and ways of working. Our creative director Sami was also on stage talking about embracing complexity as the new normal.
Junnu, Shakti, Sonja, & Valeria attended the conference, which brought in keynote speakers like Mike Montiero, Priya Prakash, Kim Goodwin and Dori Tunstall among many other inspiring voices from the industry. The voices converged towards a core and important message to the community — the importance of knowing our self and how we work with others over tools and frameworks, being inclusive of ethics and diversity and most importantly that our roles manifest a lot of power and responsibility towards the futures we want to build.
All talks and keynotes are available to stream here.
Sami’s talk about embracing complexity can be found from here. And if you’re in Berlin, you can catch his keynote on a similar topic tomorrow morning, Saturday 7 September.
Ethics & design
On Friday Anna M. Seppänen from Helsinki University led a discussion about really important subjects: ethics, empathy and corporate social responsibility, and how those issues are maybe more relevant now than ever before. It seems that those concepts have become buzzwords that are misused quite often, so it’s good to clarify things a bit. We will also share and discuss our own experiences about this subject.
Dances with longboards
In last weeks BTAWB (Better Than After-Work Beer) -sessions we tried longboard dancing basics by HELdance Crew and our very own Sari who masters this art! Thanks for organizing this event, it was something completely different for most of us!
What else happened this week…
Valeria enjoyed a couple of days at Joint Futures conference. Neat organization and great speakers!
Liam’s enjoying the moody beginning of autumn while he digs into best practices in survey design.
Elisa has facilitated an external workshop at the office and started to plan Christmas party, cause the fall has started.
Matti has been feeling the summer vibes and sunny weathers in Amsterdam, where the Team Europe is mostly back from holidays and is waiting eagerly to work on continuing & new projects around The Netherlands!
Sari feel’s that Autumn is the time for multitasking and getting stuff done!
Shakti continues the last leg of designs for an ongoing project and also gained some new inspirations at Joint Futures conference with Sonja and Valeria.
Masha continued working on a new project at VR and feels that the project switching as well as new places to have lunch and meeting new people is quite refreshing.
Helmi attended an interesting workshop about Design Systems hosted by Invision, had insightful brainstorming sessions with the team while finalizing a global online survey but also is getting ready to pass the driving license and packing up to move into a new place.
Mika L is planning together with the team on how to run international co-creation sessions to test our hypothesis for future concepts.
Meri has enjoyed the start of school, meeting new people and surprisingly some faces from the past too. In addition she’s diving into some new and exciting challenges at VR.
Yet another week at client. Between the meetings and daily design work Linda has been planning user tests which will help her team to define the following steps of a product. She’s been happy to take in some useful insights and inspiration from Joint Futures — even though this time remotely via Yle Areena!
After listening to design talks about diversity, responsibility, ethics and meaning in the Joint Futures Conference, Sonja is fully charged to make the world a better place with design! Also, ready to fix things that we have made worse with design.
Jukka has been having incremental battles on many fronts at VR. A new production release is nearing, mapping train wagons has proceeded and marketing things have been taken further. Life is good in Pasila/Ilmala.
Topias continues the research for an international project and has been enjoying the brainstorm sessions with fun and talented co-workers after the long period of being only designer in a team in the previous project.
5 Things we read this week
- The Green New Deal for Europe — A political response to climate change that is on the same scale as the problem itself.
- The Privacy Project — The New York Times’ project for exploring the technology and where it’s taking us.
- The importance of personal design work from Avocode — Staying diverse and collaborating with other artists, featuring GMUNK.
- Migrating design systems from Smashing Magazine — Moving from Sketch to Figma has become a hot topic around our Slack channels
- Apple Leaks Indicate AR Headset In Development from Forbes— News of a new headset in development
Weeknotes are what happened at our studio this week. This week’s weeknote was curated by Topias Teirikko.
Topias is a senior designer at Nordkapp and in addition to working in an interesting international project, he is currently looking for a new band. Let him know if you need a bass player!
