Category: Students’ stories

  • Motive based profiling in Service Design by Kuudes

    Juha-Pekka Ahvenainen, Markus Alavaikko We participated design breakfast arranged by Kuudes. According to their web pages Kuudes is Nordic insight, strategy and design agency. They have been doing motive based profiling of the customers for over ten years and they have published their latest studies last year. Kuudes has found eight different Finnish customer profiles…

  • Designing Business at OP – thoughts from an excursion visit

    I got the chance to participate in a company excursion visit to OP Financial Group organised by Ompeluseuran Palvelumuotoilijat. Ulla Jones, Design Culture Lead at OP was to give a presentation on and around the topic Business Design. What it is and how it was applied at OP. I was really looking forward to this…

  • Facilitation for 100 people? How to cope that?

    Facilitation for 100 people? How to cope that?

    Facilitation is the key of service design projects. According to Schein (1990) facilitation is a process of HELPING, putting more emphasize on inquiry of the problem, and combining methods that will help facilitator be enabler, not a leader of the process with the approach of owning the problem. In the last project I became a part of…

  • Digital trends: Will 2018 be the year of Virtual reality?

    Is 2018 going to be the year of Virtual Reality? Jeremy Dalton, the Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Lead for PWC, wants to believe, but doesn’t think the public is ready yet. Last week I attended a series of lectures in London about Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (VR) and how companies are using…

  • Learning programming through the power of design and data

      “Programming is boring” With these words began a Design Lab lecture at Campus London. The two speakers Jenny and Regina were presenting a case study of developing NoobLab tool, an intelligent learning environment for teaching programming. The speakers had just concluded an eight month project at Kingston University, where the goal was to develop…

  • BELT BOOTCAMP NORRKÖPING 2017

    Juha-Pekka Ahvenainen, Markus Alavaikko We were lucky to be part of the winning team at Digital Wellbeing Sprint (DWS) which took place in Metropolia Leppävaara on August 2017. The first price was an opportunity take part in the third Belt Bootcamp on 18-20 September 2017 in Norrköping, Sweden. We were able to send two of…

  • Swimming in a Sea of Possibilities – Design Thinking and the Beauty of Teamwork

    A two-day course in design thinking taught me that a team is more than a group of people and that in our aim to reach our goals, failure can be a positive thing.

  • To E5 and Beyond

    “A lawyer, an engineer, a UX expert, a business developer, and a sociologist walk into a room and…” sounds like the intro to a bad joke.  However, this is exactly what happened on the first day of our Practical Design Thinking class at Laurea.  The task we were given was carefully chosen, not too narrow…

  • Finding my inner designer

    I started my studies in Service Design this autumn 2017 and Design Thinking was the very first course I took part in. As there was the word “design” in the course title I was a bit worried about my capabilities to succeed in this. These worries became a reality soon as the course started and…

  • Can a lawyer learn Design Thinking? The lawyer: “Hold my beer.”

    I have never seen myself as having anything to do with design. Me, a public sector senior manager with a law degree, who loves books and exercise – doesn’t really scream design, does it? What I do have is an open mind, which is why I found myself being a fresh Laurea SID student receiving my…