Category: Design Thinking

  • Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 5/5

    Multidisciplinary teamwork, simple but effective tools, virtual work, visualization, prototyping, design thinking… There are tons of different tools designers can use in their work. This is my final blog post about the designer tools our innovation team uses in our everyday work here at the UNICEF Headquarters in New York. This time I’ll introduce two projects relating to…

  • Learning in Action – How We Won the Second Place in a Service Design Competition

    ”Could you send a female inspector?” This is how Jaakko started our pitch at Sitras’s Service Design competition on March 3, 2014. The competition was part of Sitra’s new security forum, and it intended to test how service design could help to improve public services and make them more user-centric. The actual design goal set…

  • Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 1/5

    In my last blog post I talked about key principles behind successful innovations. This time I want to share some of the tools our innovation team uses in our daily work here at UNICEF Headquarters in New York to help envision and test successful innovations. Because the list is long, I will keep posting during…

  • Thinking like a Designer

    In September 2013 started my SID journey at Laurea Leppävaara unit with Design thinking –course and I must say – what a start for our Master program!  Laurea had invited Design professor and entrepreneur Katja Tschimmel and Founder and author of FORTH Innovation method Gijs van Wulfen to teach us what Design thinking is. During…

  • Innovating mind should be like a parachute

    New innovations are launched by companies worldwide almost daily. I have been wondering how many new innovations in design has for e.g. toothbrush evolved. What customers need is what customers get. However you can’t just ask them for what kind of toothbrush they would like to have, because they don’t know. Of course companies need…

  • Energized by Design Thinking

    Evening after the final contact session of Design Thinking course ended at Laurea, we made a family visit to our friends. Right from the door, they asked about my studies and that pretty much set the course of the evening. Eager to share the experience, I started telling about Laurea environment and learning principles, new…

  • Service Innovation and Design: A Giant Leap

    13th September 2013, my first master class on “Design Thinking and Innovation” at Laurea University and I must say What A START!!! It was a very exciting day meeting all new people and introducing each other in all different ways. For example by creating persona, empathy maps and bingo game, this made it easier for…

  • Innovation in perspective

    In our first contact session with Gijs van Wulfen and Katja Tschimmel, we experienced a lightning version of an innovation process with Design Thinking: 2 days, not even 14 hours of work. And I’ve been wondering… What about real-life innovation? Can you expect to find a great brand new solution in just a couple of…

  • Don’t think innovation, think usefulness

    “We need you to design a gadget for blind people. The gadget will be attachable on the side of a cup, and when the poured liquid starts to overflow from the cup it would beep and alert the user. It’ll be battery powered and should cost less than 10 Dollars.” This, more or less, was…

  • How to be a good designer

    You need to have the right mindset Nigel Cross, Emeritus Professor of Design Studies in the UK describes in his book Design Thinking (2011) successful designers as optimists and opportunists, who are exploring uncertainty hopefully and dedicated to the tasks in hand. Unlike engineers who want to test, measure and prove something, designers cope with…