Category: Students’ stories

  • 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…

  • Becoming a Design Thinker

    Nearly two decades ago I completed my Master’s Degree in Business. My work history is in consumer marketing and brand management. In the marketing, thinking “outside the box” has been a common way of working. Now, as a new Service Design student at Laurea, I am learning to become a “Design Thinker”. Design Thinking is…

  • MyData 2017 – Health Profile Hackathon

    MyData 2017 – Health Profile Hackathon

    Juha-Pekka Ahvenainen, Markus Alavaikko, Markus Torkkeli The National Institute of Health and Welfare (THL) is a state agency that promotes the wellbeing and health of the population, prevents diseases and social problems, and develops social and health services. It also is the statutory statistical authority in health and welfare in Finland maintaining a knowledge base…

  • At the Footprints of Nobel Winners – Cambridge Venture Camp 2017

    Hello, We are three Master´s Degree students from Laurea Tikkurila where we are studying in a program called “Future Studies and Customer Oriented Services”. Last autumn we participated in a course ”Digitaalisen palvelun käyttäjäkeskeinen suunnittelu” and there we started to develop a business idea for a digital application called ”Big Steps for Little People”, and with that…

  • Can Design Thinking Provide the Breakthroughs We Need to Reduce Global Poverty and Domestic Violence?

    Can Design Thinking Provide the Breakthroughs We Need to Reduce Global Poverty and Domestic Violence?

    Design thinking can help us eliminate extreme poverty, save millions more lives, inform and educate better, promote human rights more widely, and protect much more of the natural world… if funding agencies are willing to accept the same levels of ambiguity and uncertainty that designer must.

  • Educating the Design Thinkers of Tomorrow

    My Daughter My first-born started her school journey this autumn. It’s the same school that I attended 30 years ago, a respected and multicultural school, back then quite a traditional one – discipline based, classroom centric, the teacher standing in front of the class, the pupils listening. It still is a good school, but I…

  • Stages, more stages and the same stages all over again

    The Design Thinking course on September 2nd-3rd 2016 was very illuminating. Doing Design Thinking by following a specific model really shows how much work should be put in design work itself from exploring to implementing. Doing the same thing over and over again with different methods (moodboard, brainwriting etc.) truly opens up new ideas during the…