Weeknote #687: Rails & Tennis
This week we’ve been a part of National Railways renewal and played some virtual tennis.
VR.fi Launch
Our Annukka and others have been working with VR’s own design team and other collaborators to launch an amazing new website & eshop for VR, the Finnish National Railways.
This service touches so many Finnish people’s daily lives, that I couldn’t be happier to see the results and prouder that Nordkapp was involved. Check it out at vr.fi
Working Online
Recently our Valeria and the rest of the Design System team have been running lots of online Figma workshops for designers at our client. These workshops can be very productive, since you can have a dozen designers working simultaneously on the same design system, and producing so much in one day. Multiuser Figma is quite amazing in that.
The Funniest part of the most recent full-day workshop was of course the warm-up exercise called Figma Tennis. In it, designers move as a team from artboard to artboard to draw a concept on top of the previous team’s artboard concept. I guess the results prove that even designers don’t always produce the most beautiful of things, but freestyling like this has other benefits. It gets everybody in a good mood for the following group work, and their figma fingers warm. Recommended as a starter for any creative workshop.
What else happened this week?
Annukka has been conducting user interviews to gather insight for a business design project. Insight from real life never stops inspiring.
Topias is getting ready for the interesting autumn.
Liam returns this week from a 6-week paternity break, happily adjusting to the new life, and refreshed to return to work!
Shakti’s spent his week designing interactions concepts for an app, polishing our Nordkapp website and evaluating opportunities in wearable sound. Additionally, he experienced an an aha moment in fixing a critical user-experience challenge purely through copywriting with the support of our resident expert Joska. We’ll have this very exciting project shared soon, keep your eyes open!
Sari is back in business after a refreshing Autumn vacation.
This week Sami has been balancing thinking visually in complex systems with practical stakeholder management and having his first (domestic) business flight in seven months.
Five things we read this week:
- Going from UX to service design; the stark honest truth no one will tell you from Practical Service Design — An article from 2017 resurfaced. We generally don’t like silos, and feel that multi-disciplinary designers can do all sorts of things from project to project.
- ‘No specific skill will get you ahead in the future’ — but this ‘way of thinking’ will from CNBC Make It — There’s an oft-quoted saying that “to a man with a hammer, everything looks like nails.” But what if that man had a hammer, a screwdriver, and a wrench? See also previous list item.
- The Social Dilemma from Netflix — A thought-provoking documentary about how few nerds in Silicon Valley knowingly and unknowingly created the current mind altering and socially destructive social media services.
- Mobility Trends Reports from Apple Maps—COVID‑19 Mobility Trends Reports are published daily and reflect requests for directions in Apple Maps. It seems that during Autumn, we humans became more active than before Covid, only to fall back to baseline again. Let’s see what the future months will bring.
- Trump vs. Biden First Presidential Debate — Let’s store this here for the history books. Again, the Americans get to select the most powerful man in the world, yet the debate they get to watch is childish, and frankly a sh*tshow. Please fix your leaders — BR, the world.
Weeknotes are what happened at our studio this week. This week’s weeknote was curated by Teppo Kotirinta.
First name is Principal Designer at Nordkapp, who is reasonably happy to keep remote working at home, since at least he gets to see his kids more than usually.
