I participated in the Reaktor’s first Design day on 3^rd of October in Helsinki and it took place in event center Telakka. Reaktor is a Finnish design & software house. Design day was great opportunity for me to learn and to share ideas with other participants. The whole event was very inspirational and energetic and I have to say that the arrangements for the day were excellent. Here are the speeches which I picked from the program.

The day started with Ryan Singer’s speech about “How to focus your product design”. Ryan is a leader at 37signals which has made for example a project management tool Basecamp. Next speaker was Henrik Rydberg from Shapeways . He talked about “Failceed”, that it is OK to fail when you’re creating something new and it is necessary when creating something new. Creativity needs safe place for play and find out was it good idea.

Before lunch we heard about “Content world domination” from Ilona Hiila. Ilona is one of the founders and Creative Director at content agency Vapa Media. This subject was very interesting for me. She talked about how we can dominate with our content. First we should find shared interest with our customers and speak with them more than just about our products. Second we should create and own the moments with them and be the person you want to be with, without selling. Third the content should be more important than the product or service. It is not bowling anymore where you just try to hit your target but you should play ping pong with your customers and create content with them. You give something for them and they hit it back to you and you response to that and so on.

After lunch, Karen Holzblatt from InContext, took the stage with the topic “What makes things cool?” and Jonathan Moore from Style Hatch with the topic “Beyond Pixels”. After that, graphic designers, data visualization specialists and educators Juuso Koponen and Jonatan Hildén talked about “What every designer can learn from data visualization?”

Design day ended with very energetic show “Design renegade” from James White who is a visual artist, designer and speaker from Canada. He has his own Signalnoise Studio  and I think his show was perfect way to end that great day with design and designers.

This blog post is a part of SID course The Current Topics and it’s written by SID student Minna Myyryläinen.