Category: Students’ stories

  • CULTIVATING RESILIENCE, A RAY OF HOPE

    Ups & downs… but they remain… resilience is not the result… they were already like that… they discontinue their activity… but they rise again, like the phoenix… result of their true alignment with their mission and values … they can just not help it. Fragility is a constant in small to medium NGOs, that have…

  • Empathy in action – how to protect toddler naps in extreme circumstances

    You know the Fazer chocolates, right? You have seen them at the airports at least.   Some years ago, a construction company called NCC in Finland had to renovate an office above a nursery at the Fazer chocolate factory. This created a challenge: how to keep the noisy construction from waking up the toddlers during their…

  • Diving Into the World of Design Thinking

    “Now I want you all to introduce yourselves, but this time you will do it differently.” – this is how our Design Thinking course started and little did we know what will follow afterwards. To present ourselves we were divided into groups, where each of us had to first, speak about her/himself, second, count one…

  • Once upon a time, there was a design thinker…

    Once upon a time, there was a design thinker…

    The first course in our exciting journey of Service Innovation and Design learning started with a deep dive into the world of Design Thinking. Our class has an interesting mix of different professional domains and backgrounds, which, as we learned from professor Katja Tschimmel, is a great foundation for a creative team.  …who believed in the power of collaboration The two…

  • Design Thinking at first touch

    DT is becoming extensively popular in modern era as more and more organizations are striving to provide compelling and innovative solutions to their customers. Design thinking helps to expand one’s creativity as well as enables one to utilize a broader range of tools and approaches for innovative solutions. What is it exactly? Design thinking has…

  • A Design Thinking Crash Test

    Erika Bäck & Sabine Maselkowski Two days of Design Thinking ‘crash test’ (read: course) behind. All we think is we need to pass, like a car tested for the safety standards. Days went by at high-speed, challenging our ways of thinking and working, let’s start… Design? Design Thinking?  To get answers we looked both past…

  • Designing your own way with design thinking

    Designing your own way with design thinking

    Making career choices when you’re 18 years old can be cumbersome. The childhood dream jobs, being a doctor or a policeman, probably have changed multiple times leaving you uncertain about what the future will look like. So, what does it take to find your dream job? As we started out journey in the SID program…

  • Becoming a Design Thinker and Doer

    Design Thinking in action Our journey to the realm of Design Thinking started in extraordinary conditions, because our lecturer Katja Tschimmel wasn’t able to attend the course physically – nor some of the students – because of COVID-19. In spite of this, we got an inspiring and participative start for our studies. The best thing…

  • Fail like a designer

    Fail like a designer

    Our image of the world is built on assumptions and schemas. Without them, our everyday life would feel chaotic and quite burdensome. However, in an innovation process, our assumptions mainly work against us. They keep us from thinking outside the box. You could even say that assumption is the mother of all screw-ups.   Without intentionally…

  • Unlocking Creativity for Design Thinking

    Unlocking Creativity for Design Thinking

    We started our journey as SID students in early September 2020 with a two-day workshop that introduced the concept and process of Design Thinking. It was hosted by Katja Tschimmel and our tutoring teacher Päivi Pöyry-Lassila. Katja is the founder of design agency Mindshake and the model Evolution 6² or E6² (2018), Päivi is a…