Category: Students’ stories

  • Days #1-3 in my Design Studies

    “I want to develop and improve public services” was my answer to the question “What are your personal objectives to study Service Innovation and Design”. “Good luck” said the teacher and her voice was full of cheer and encouragement – I think. Although the quality of public services is relatively good in Finland there is always…

  • Four tips to prevent innovator’s block

    How to get the ideas flow? What if the others think our idea is lame? What if we fail? These are some of the reasons why people struggle with innovation and I have also find myself pondering these same questions. “Ideas stand in the corner and laugh while we fight over them.” -Marty Rubin I…

  • Designing is about doing, not talking!

    “Design is all about action, and business too often gets stuck at the talking stage. Uncertainty comes with the territory when business objective is growth. But that doesn’t mean that you are powerless to do anything about it. You can’t make it go away, but you can manage it rather than allow it to manage…

  • Designers: Think BIG! … but also BEYOND and GLOCAL

    Designers: Think BIG! … but also BEYOND and GLOCAL

    Tim Brown, in his book Change by Design (100% recommended), urges a global change by what he calls Design Thinking. Tim proposes to the world a new way to face the upcoming challenges, the small but also the big ones. A new way of redesigning the world. He offers a tool usable for every person…

  • Flight SID2014: Take-Off in the World of Design Thinker

    On 12th Sep, 2014 0900Hrs flight SID2014 took-off with my cloudy thoughts into the world of Design Thinking. With clear flight path, our Captains Katja Tschimmel and Gijs van Wulfen, introduced each other. I was surprised when Katja introduced Gijs and Gijs introduced Katja. But that is how I learn about “Collaboration principle in Design…

  • 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…

  • Behind the scenes – Tools in innovation designers’ sandbox Part 4/5

    The New York University (NYU) students I referred to in my last blog post about virtual work were asked to prepare a 1-minute video to communicate their ideas for the next class. There are so many ways to visualize projects and their components that I can only just begin to grasp the subject in this post. I…

  • Master Thesis: Empowering Child Sponsorship with Service-Dominant Logic

    In this blog post, I Introduce my master thesis and share some of my personal experiences from the MBA studies. As part of my master thesis (which can be downloaded from here: Salo Erkki Master Thesis) I developed a Service-Dominant Logic based business model canvas application for child sponsorship organizations. With the help of the canvas, value…

  • 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…

  • Culture & Service Design

    Service design is allegedly a human-centered method for developing new services. A great effort is made for capturing users’ needs, mental models, experiences, desired outcomes… —you name it! Although this is done specifically borrowing techniques from ethnography, there’s barely no mention to cultural differences! With increasingly global companies, rising migration rates or whole sectors —such…