By Laura Järveläinen, Nina Kostamo Deschamps, Marta Kuroszczyk & Kristina Stening

Almost a year has passed since we organized the Helsinki Chapter of Global Sustainability Jam. Back then we had just started our Service Innovation & Design (SID) Master’s programme at Laurea. Freshly inspired from the Design Thinking course, we jumped right in at the opportunity to make our own jam happen and put our knowledge into practice.

As a learning experience, we can’t recommend it enough: we learned a great deal about facilitation, event design and collaborative design. It was “learning by developing” at its best. And most importantly, we had fun!

We were not just planning a workshop. In fact, we were designing a 3-day long design thinking event and experience. As a result, the design and planning process was very intense. We also ended up designing the jam in just 3 weeks with almost zero budget. The amount of positive response and feedback we got from the participants were extremely rewarding and made all our efforts worthwhile. It goes without saying that meeting and working with new and very diverse people became the most important part of this successful jam experience.

You might want to check out our visual report from the jam. It covers topics such as how we organized the event, key learnings, our tips and more:

https://www.slideshare.net/secret/Nc18l9IZanBcR3

or https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v_nIcaHz3I-jzZ3uOaHnLavGvYMdKSknJWRbrVpxaPY/edit?usp=sharing

P.S. The Helsinki Chapter for the Global Sustainability Jam has not been picked up yet for this year 😉 Do it, you won’t regret it!