Service Innovation & Design
-
The Courage to Share Rough Ideas: Why Prototyping Drives Innovation
Written by Marin Anita & Sarker Md Saddam Hossain In most workplaces, and even in everyday life, we are under pressure to deliver ready and polished solutions. However, Design Thinking shows us a counterintuitive paradox: incomplete prototypes, messy drawings, crude models, rapid mock-ups — this is where magic happens. Prototyping is not just a design…
-
Setting the stage for creative freedom
By Heidi Aho, Shahida Parvin, & Eduardo Solorzano Tejeda. Design Thinking (DT) and Innovation require a lot of creativity. Creativity is often described as a spark of inspiration, but it is far more complex and deeply human. It happens at the intersection of emotions, environments, and culture. To truly nurture creativity, we need to look…
-
Why, why, why Design Thinking?
“It’s not ‘us versus them’ or even ‘us on behalf of them.’ For a design thinker it has to be ‘us with them’”. –Tim Brown Reflections by Marita Ruotsalainen and Katja Räisänen The workshop days of Design Thinking with engaging pracademic Daniela Marzavan felt like looking at something familiar through a pair of new glasses…
-
Design Thinking: from discomfort and failure to intriguingness and success
We think that we had inspiring and pragmatic teaching on design thinking during the contact days in Leppävaara campus. As we heard from Marzavan (2024) design thinking is slowly starting to be integrated in major corporations, institutions, organizations and even some governments such as the German government has at least one person with design thinking background…
-
Design thinking – There are no one-size-fits-all solutions
Reflection by Nikhil Agarwal, Heini Hutinen and Sahan Ganegama Design thinking has emerged as a dynamic, multifaceted approach to problem-solving, blending creativity, user-centered insights, and structured methodologies to foster innovation. Reflecting on the literature and discussions surrounding design thinking, several key insights arise, highlighting both the potential and complexities of this approach. A Shift from…
-
From design thinking to design your life: Don’t think, experience!
Written by Linh Duong and Mira Airola. Do you know that Finland is in fact the forerunner in the service design field? Finland has the highest proportion of service and business designers, at least until 2016 (Adair, 2018 from LinkedIn Mar 9, 2016). Finland has the highest proportion of service and business designers (Source: Adair,…
-
“Train Your Empathy Muscle”: A Crucial Skill in Service Design
How often have you thought of empathy as a skill which can be trained? During the Design Thinking class, we found out that empathy is an important characteristic for a service designer to have, but it is also a quality and a tool which can be improved. Empathy is a prolific discussion point in Design…
-
Designing thinking and change in practice
by Carolina Faria & Irina Tikanvaara The teaching sessions with Daniela Marzavan, where we had two thought-provoking days and a hands-on workshop, provided a widening experience of the practical use of design thinking to solve a given task. The goal was to find the solutions for practical cases using design thinking, its methods and tools…
-
How Interdisciplinary teams are the catalyst to innovations
Imagine this: a group of experts in one specific field are working together on an incredibly challenging problem. They are intelligent, proficient, and polite. They ask reasonable questions, answer them and everyone agrees with each other. Perfect picture, isn’t it? Or not? Picture: AI generated image that represents the homogeneous team. According to Linda A.Hill…
