Service Innovation & Design

  • Design day from the designers to the designers

    I participated in the Reaktor’s first Design day on 3rd of October in Helsinki and it took place in event center Telakka. Reaktor is a Finnish design & software house. Design day was great opportunity for me to learn and to share ideas with other participants. The whole event was very inspirational and energetic and I…

  • The Rabbit Hole of Design Thinking

    Professor and researcher Katja Tschimmel and ideation facilitator Gijs van Wulfen showed us where the Rabbit Hole of Design Thinking is. So I also jumped in it, dug together with fellows hands on for two full days – and we are still digging. The more we explore, the more we find. This post is about what…

  • Besign Thinking: A simple framework for incorporating “Design Thinking” into the traditional “Business Thinking” for innovation!

    Ever since I got introduced to the concept of Design Thinking, I had this feeling that this could be a game changer for how we do our business innovations. In a nutshell, because it starts with the customer as sole for finding innovations. This may be obvious for anyone knowing about Design Thinking fundamentals, but…

  • The amazing journey started

    A new journey started on 12 September 2013! It won’t be a lonely journey as we have a great crew with different backgrounds and stories. It was really nice to meet my classmates and start the program together. We come from different countries and work in different industries. I believe that it will be very interesting as we…

  • Doing micro and then macro

    Mikko Jäppinen and Heikki Savonen, service designers from service design company Palmu Inc (along with Pasi Sihvonen from University of Helsinki) presented their latest project: “University of Helsinki, make us simple, please?” in Service design breakfast event in Start-up Sauna in Espoo, Finland. University of Helsinki had hired (after a public tender) Palmu to redesign their…

  • Responsive UX design by CGI Finland

    CGI (former Logica) provided a half day workshop / get-together for some Finnair and CGI staff in Finnair’s premises on Friday 30 September. They had invited their own service designer (UX Lead) Markku Myllylahti to explain about service design and some projects where they had used service innovation and UX design methods. In presentation itself…

  • Innovation versus an intern’s comfort zone

    I met Christopher Fabian, co-lead of UNICEF’s Innovation Unit at New York Headquarters, in spring 2012 in Finland. He was one of the panelists at the conference “Zombie Innovations or True Development” organized by Aalto University. During the conference I realized how close the subject was to my Master’s Study Programme in Service Innovation and…

  • First step: backwards

    It was the morning of our second school day at Laurea, and the coffee line was long. We sat in the cafe with a classmate and watched the line getting longer and longer. In a few minutes, we had come up with a solution to improve the situation. Or so we thought. When our first…

  • What does social activism mean in service design context?

    Background: Service as a form of social interaction Anna Meroni, Assistant Professor of Service and Strategic Design at Politecnico di Milano, visited Aalto University on 10 September 2013 at Service Design Goes Public  seminar. Meroni’s main area of interest is social innovation considered in different areas of activity.  Meroni started  her key note speech by…

  • Measuring Services – A Book Review

    – DO YOUR MATH! “Service Design: From Insight to Implementation” by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Loevlie and Ben Reason (2013 Rosenfeld Media) is a positively different service design book, whereas this – rather loose – book review is written as an extra assignment of the course New Service Development by Tiia-Marina Tuominen de Sousa e Silva…