Global Service Jam Helsinki 2016 took place at Laurea Leppävaara campus on 26-28^th February. There were about 50 Jammers at Leppävaara but we had other Jammers all around world; about 40 countries and 100 cities were Jamming together with us at the same time. The main idea of the Jam is to work in small teams and develop new services and solutions based on a certain theme by processing ideas into hands-on solutions while using service design methods, problem solving, testing and prototyping.

The secret theme was announced on Friday evening; a sound of a water splash! This splash inspired everyone thinking a problem related to this sound which they would like to solve during the Jam. Small teams were created around those problems which we participants found were the most interesting ones.

Our team´s problem was: How to reduce the use of water bottles and still look cool when drinking water. On Friday we started brainstorming ideas and themes around this problem. We used Legos building up different environments where people use water. We also thought of different purposes people need water for. Based on this, we ended up thinking if people would know the closest source for water, would it reduce the amount of bottled water purchased from e.g. supermarkets and stores. As a solution we created a mobile application “Easy Water”, which finds you the closest water point based on your location and provides you a map to locate it. We built a paper prototype of the application to show to people at Sello shopping center on Saturday.

On Saturday we interviewed people at Sello and showed and talked them through our application. At the same, we gathered their ideas and development proposals. Back at campus, we tried to develop our idea and application further based on that information. Because none of use hadn´t shoot videos before, we started working on a power point presentation as our final presentation to show on Sunday.

On Sunday we continued working on the final presentation when heard from mentors and tutors that power point presentations were not liked (at all) as a way of presenting. We didn´t know this, being rookies all the three of us… We had roughly two hours left before final presentation show time to come up with totally new idea of conveying our solution to other and to judges. We ended up acting it!! What a relief it was when the presentation was over. We made it, with so little experience and in such a short time!

My advice: Go Jamming even if you´re a rookie! It will be a learning lesson by doing, not lectures. It feels difficult and frustrating at times but you also gain those Ahaa!-experiences as well. And you learn a big deal from others; mentors, tutors, visiting lecturers, other teams and from your own team members. You even might want to go jamming again!