Category: Students’ stories

  • Young designer from Norway, experiments with using visualization tools and methods from service design thinking, to enhance engagement of previous prisoners and troubled youth

    Young designer from Norway, experiments with using visualization tools and methods from service design thinking, to enhance engagement of previous prisoners and troubled youth

    Caroline Chaffin, a Norwegian student who is about to graduate with an MBA degree in Service Innovation and Design, wanted to do something different for her Master thesis. With a previous background from Healthcare and Social entrepreneurship, she wanted to find a case company with a social purpose, which allowed her to work close with…

  • Knocking on your shoulder

    Knock knock… Hi, could we ask some questions from you? This is how we started to gather customer data. I have the pleasure to be a part of a service design project that aims to improve Laurea´s student services. The head of the project is a design agency Kuudes Kerros. Other team members are Laurea´s…

  • The Evolution of a Service Concept – Case FORGE

    The course New Service Development and Innovative Business Models brought us first real life experience in service innovation and design by working in groups on an existing service concept offered by FORGE Service Lab. FORGE, mothered by Digile, is a non-profit accelerator for digital service creation with the ultimate goal to assist boosting the internationalization of…

  • Seamless Service Productisation

    What is productisation of services? How to make services seem vivid? What is service innovation? These were some of the questions to be answered in a half day seminar I took part in at Aalto University, Otaniemi a couple of weeks ago. The seminar was opened by Miia Martinsuo, Professor from Tampere University of Technology.…

  • 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…