Last weekend I was Jamming. Service Jam 2016 HKI took place at Laurea Leppävaara-campus. Service Jam is yearly event where people gather around to create new services in 48 hours. Jam is all about testing different techniques, learning from each other’s and having fun.

This year 102 Jams were organized in 41 countries. Jam has always a theme, which is same all over the world. Theme is never unequivocal. At the beginning of the Jam participants are shown a video from Global Service Jam headquarters. This year the theme was a sound of something falling into water (or at least that´s what it sounded like) a . After the theme was released we had some games with whole group to create problems witch we needed to solve during weekend by creating ideas, products and services. After problems were ready it was time to gather groups around problems. That is how I ended up with the best group of the Jam.

There were 6 of us in our team. From the first moments our team was excellent. Our problem was “How to reduce the use of water bottles and still look cool when drinking water”. I wanted to work with this problem, because it was something touchable and simple (or so it felt on Friday). We came up with an idea of water bottle with intelligence. Our water bottle will tell you when water has too much bacteria, or when you have been drinking too little. You can also personalize the bottle because it´s label is made of electric paper and allows you to download for example your own photos on the side of the bottle.

Precenting our service with Lego girl

Working with our team was hilarious.  We brainstormed, laughed and encouraged each other’s for better and better ideas and solution. We made prototypes of bottles and apps, built scenes with Legos, filmed videos for our presentation. We were so excited that hours and days just fly by. On Sunday at 2 pm. we were finally ready. At 3 pm. started presentations. We were ready. We were fifth on a row. Our presentation was a video and we were super happy and proud of it. After we had shown it our feedback from judges started with a comment that the first judge had not understood what was our idea. It was devastating. Luckily other two judges had had the idea. We thought that we had lost our chances in competition, so you can imagine our surprise (and faces) when judges pronounced our team to be the winning team.

I recommend Service Jam for all students who have even a little interest for service design. It´s a great place to meet interesting people and think outside of the box. I want to thank my excellent team members Karolina, Maija, Hanna, Jouni and Mika. I´m hoping to work with you in some other projects in future. See you!

Team coolWater before presentation.