Weeknote #634: The darkness is here — how we survive
November has started and Finland is heading towards the darkest season of the year. Here are 5 tips on how we Nordkappians survive the darkness.
1. Enjoy the light when you see it
Although we have only 8 hours of light during the day, you can see beautiful sunrises and sunsets if you look up in the sky.
2. Meet new people
It is always delightful to get to know new interesting people. This week Joska Pyykkö started as a Senior Strategist at Nordkapp. Joska has a background in strategy, content, comms, and marketing and possesses a journalistic curiosity. When not working, synthesizers and photography occupy his time on the occasion that his family doesn’t. We are happy to welcome him!
3. Celebrate and have fun
The darkness and cold are hard to handle for many of us, so we pay attention to wellbeing and having also fun. On Tuesday we celebrated new business opportunities, that Mika and Virpi achieved.
4. Wear colors
The most popular color combination at Nordkapp is black on black, but some of us have started to tackle the darkness with yellow.
5. Do indoor activities
As a new leisure activity, we have started to visit museums this fall. On Friday part of our team is heading to Amos Rex to see Birger Carlstedt’s exhibition Le Chat Doré.
“Designing for the future” — meetup in Bucharest
Our colleague from Amsterdam Timo Mashiyi-Veikkola is going to be a speaker at the meetup in Bucharest already next Wednesday. He will focus on research methodologies that you can benefit the most from, collaborative thinking in design processes, how to use different perspectives to approach the project and, of course, future. Welcome!
What else happened this week?
Jutta has been experiencing big culture differences & clashes and also been thinking quite much about gender equality.
Topias & Mika are traveling to Oxford, England for facilitating workshops with local people about the future of driving.
Joska has been getting up to speed, up to date and ahead by kicking things off at the office and researching future signals.
Virpi is doing good — submerged herself into futures stuff and enjoying herself. Things are taking their shape on many fronts.
Jukka has been knee-deep in pilot user feedback and support, planning future features and use flows for tickets, wagon maps, accessibility, and customer ship, as well as kickstarting some new iconography work.
Matti has been busy again in The Netherlands, kicking off two new projects while also meeting new potential customers! At home front, he has been investigating the super interesting world of recycling and waste management with a new Finnish customer.
Eero is trying to kill the jetlag after flying west after a week of Tokyo.
Sari has been checking that everything is fine with the next increment designs and that the developers are happy with them before she leaves to her holiday.
Teppo is cranking out designs, and learning new and not-so-new things in UX tests.
Sonja is again in Chicago! This time doing resonance testing on a driving experience project.
Meri has found her favorite project of the year. Thinking of how to encourage more sustainable consumption behavior and actually finding answers is highly rewarding. It’s great to collaborate with a client who strives to incentivize customers through positivity.
Liam and Sonja are in Chicago this week, having really fruitful conversations with locals here about their driving experiences, and finding out how they feel about the concepts we’ve spent the autumn working on. Traveling for work is always a little tough, but the reward of being right here with the target user is really nice! (The other reward is deep-dish pizza)
This week Linda has been creating some designs for the future while making sure everything is in place for the upcoming beta launch.
And me Elisa, I’m already prepared for December’s festive season and glad that we got the first snow today in Helsinki.
Five things we read this week:
- Facebook’s logo Gets a Face-Lift from Wired— Today’s brand redesign is supposed to remind you that Facebook is a family of apps, with a future beyond Big Blue.
- Climate change: Here’s what 2030 could look like if we win the fight from World Economic Forum —By 2030, your CO2 emissions will be greatly reduced. Meat on your dinner table will be a rare sight. Water and the air you breathe will be cleaner and nature will be in recovery.
- Killed by Google — Killed by Google is the Google Graveyard. A full list of dead products killed by Google in the Google Cemetery.
- The Internet and the Third Estate from Stratechery — Facebook through the lenses of different ways of how society was organized before and now, with the new concepts like press and social media.
- Neural network reconstructs human thoughts from brain waves in real time from Techxplore — Researchers from Russian corporation Neurobotics and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology have found a way to visualize a person’s brain activity as actual images mimicking what they observe in real-time.
Weeknotes are what happened at our studio this week. This week’s weeknote was curated by Elisa Lipponen
Elisa is a Finance & Operations specialist at Nordkapp, who is going to convince others that Excel is your friend.
