Tag Archive | service design competition

Fastest Prototypers in the West (well, North actually)

2015-04-23 09.00.44

The opportunity to hone my service design skills came again when I signed up for the Fast Prototyping Competition. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t even read the description, I just signed up as I knew that it would be a good experience and a great challenge. Probably because I didn’t read the description, I didn’t realise that it would be a limited event. But with about 20 people attending it was small and highly motivating. The actual name that was given on the day for this event was “Aaltoes-Fjord Service Design Challenge”. There were three guys there from Fjord to help guide us through this process- Juska Teittinen, Mox Soini, and Ville Päivätie.

Fjord’s Process

We had just 9 hours to do ¾ of a Double Diamond (or 3/5 circles of the Fjord process) and present our work. It was fast prototyping alright! One of the greatest features for me was the fact that we were doing work for a real client. Fjord had come with a big client for the Finnish market to see if we could help them out with their service concepts. We were given the brief of a large travel company in Finland. It has identified 5 market segments and wanted an idea for as many segments as possible. So in this case, there were 4 teams and therefore 4 different segments were used. I really don’t know if we are allowed to share the client’s name, so I will not do that here Continue reading →

What would Marc Stickdorn do?

Mar8

Doing not talking

Just 3 short weeks after our Service Processes and Methods course was the Global Service Jam 2015. What a blast…and what an excuse to bring out the shiny new tools that Marc gave us. I don’t know about anyone else from the SID programme but I was able to utilise both the tools taught to us as well as the facilitation methods.

I know it sounds crazy but after all those Marc Stickdorn heads were circulated for his birthday photo, I couldn’t get his lessons from earlier in February out of my head. That is why I took one of those heads and wrote him a thought bubble. “What would Marc Stickdorn do?” I was inspired by all the Christians in the US who try to answer difficult problems by asking themselves what Jesus would do. It was the same thing (in my mind anyway).

I was trying to channel my inner Marc to have the strength and clarity to proceed through the next 48 hours to change the world…well, that is what we were told we were doing.

**Letting go: the theme is what? Huh? Did he just say….?**

As a first-timer I felt strangely calm (it might have been naivete) as the process started. The anticipation of the revealing of the theme and the inspirational talks by Jani Turku and Anton Schubert were a great start to the event. I really enjoyed the humour and the ease at which Jani was able to teach us some lessons about interaction and fun. Who knew it could be so interesting repeating 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3! But I also enjoyed Anton’s inspiring story of his “humble beginnings” as a mechanic.

As for the challenge…I think that everyone was stumped when the theme was revealed. I even sarcastically joked that “that must be the theme” when the instructions for the origami fortune teller was revealed…unfortunately I was right. What a theme. Not what I expected at all. But it really put us all in the same boat. This isn’t something that one person could say that they knew and that they were an authority on…it was a leveller for sure. The atmosphere when everyone (finally) realised the theme was electric. The buzz was confusion, anticipation…but mostly confusion from what I saw.

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OpenFin Challenge – How did we succeed within 22 hours?

Oct1

This is a descriptive story and self-reflective analysis of how four service design fellows & a tech consultant succeeded to come up with a strategic service ecosystem concept with viable business model just within 22 hours – and to convince a heterogeneous, multidimensional and highly professional jury.

The challenge

Open Innovation in Finance Business (OpenFin) is Aalto University project powered by OP-Pohjola and Futurice. The organizations invited creative minds to create new innovative financial service concepts for consumers and small enterprises.

OpenFin Hack & Ideathon – an open innovation challenge for future financial services was about to begin. And we were registered in! After I received green light from my employer to join the event, my participation was confirmed too. Agreement was extremely essential statement for me because I work with financial services myself and have high professional ethics.

“Other working-class citizens were looking forward to relax”

At 6 p.m. in Friday 26th September 2014, about fifty talented service designer, developers, entrepreneurs and student with different backgrounds met at Aalto University at Open Innovation House. While other working-class citizens were looking forward to relax, eight creative teams were about to solve some financial service challenges collaboratively.

#OpenFin event started with a nice dinner! Great attendance! @OpenApiFin pic.twitter.com/T0ebhEMK9H

— Riku Valtasola (@RikuJ) September 26, 2014

There we met again, feeling exited. Minna Myyryläinen, Jaakko Porokuokka, Mika Keskiväli and myself. Four 2nd year MBA students from Service Innovation & Design program from Laurea University of Applied Sciences. We were happy to welcome Technology Consultant Lassi Jatkola onboard to make our team more versatile. Lassi made sure that our team was also capable to code & hack some Proof Of Concepts if needed.

Unleash the data

OP-Pohjola provides an OpenAPI Developers documentation to empower external individual developers and communities to create the future banking services themselves. The company believes that innovative service solutions can be achieved by providing and creating the required tools in collaboration.

The rules were fair: each team owns their rights for their service concept. This is it how it should go: otherwise the principles of open innovation would collapse.

“Open data is an enormous opportunity – or actually a must”

As a designer, I follow with great interest how companies are opening up their closed frameworks for 3rd parties to play with. Open data is an enormous opportunity – or actually a must – to deliver truly seamless digital services. Otherwise all the designed service concepts that have been created with passion to improve quality-of-life and to bring value for people & business will remain torsos. Or at least developers inside the closed companies need immeasurable amount of hours and sweat to invent and reinvent the required expensive dirty tricks.

Cutting corners from design leads inevitably to poor user experience and to lose-lose-lose situation.

Isn’t that sad?

Day 1: From insights to mini posters

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Making mutual funds a mutual fun

Sep30

Openfin hack and ideathon poster

They say the best way to become a great service designer is to participate in as many service design contests and hands on happenings as possible. It was what I thought when Minna Myyryläinen, one of my SID Laurea fellow students, brought the idea to join the openfin Hack and Ideathon competition in Espoo.

Finally our team, addition to Minna and me, included Antti Kytö and Jaakko Porokuokka, all SID13 Laurea students. I knew – despite none of us being a real hacker in code – this team could do anything related to creating awesome business concepts using our service design methods and toolkits. Luckily later the hacking part was completed when I persuaded my colleague and friend Lassi Jatkola to join our team. Before the event itself the team studied trends and innovations in the financial sector and shared views and ideas through chat.

Getting ready for the challenge

On Friday 26^th the team gathered to the app campus premises and prepared itself for the 22 hour challenge ahead. Me and Jaakko had already agreed to stay overnight at the app campus as it was offered as a possibility by the competition rules.

Team preparing for the challenge

Aalto OpenFin project manager Mojtabaei Renani Mahnoush said the welcome words and wished all participants good luck. Next was Juha Viljakainen’s, from OP-Pohjola, time to give some background on OP-Pohjola and the financial service sector generally, its history and challenges.

The competion rules and three categories were introduced by Jouni Lähteenmäki from OP-Pohjola. The categories included:

consumer app innovation zone
entrepreneur app innovation zone
business ecosystem infrastructure innovation zone.

The competitors would be evaluated by financial aspect, market potential, business model viability and how realistically it could be implemented. In addition presentation with surprise factor and impressive demo would get extra credits. Final word was given Futurice’s Riku Valtasola, who explained how the business idea to concept works in the company he represents.

Beginning the design process

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Learning in Action – How We Won the Second Place in a Service Design Competition

Mar11

”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 by Sitra and the Finnish Ministry of the Interior was to think of ways to lower the barrier of reporting a racist crime.

Statistics show that the amount of reported crimes has dropped significantly. This is not necessarily good news. As the amount of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds has rised in Finland, the question is whether the amount of racist crimes has actually diminished or whether people don’t just report them anymore. Is the reporting process clear enough for people of foreign roots? Do people have the skills and the motivation to bring their issue forward? Do they trust the authorities? Is there enough knowledge? Could service design help to improve the situation?

This was the challenge of our design team, comprising four enthusiastic first-year SID-students, Jaakko, Ida, Hanna and Mervi. In addition to our service design studies, we all have different educational and professional backgrounds and skills – a group of truly T-shaped people. For us, the competition was a great opportunity to test our newly learned service design methods skills in action. We wanted to learn in practice and do something concrete. Earning some course credits while we were at it didn’t harm, either.

We knew we were competing with professional agencies and experienced service design researches and that made us all the more motivated. Heck, we really wanted to win and show what we are capable of! It turned out that our motivation, determination and willingness to prove ourselves earned us a second place in a very tight competition. We played to win. ”The hungriest team” as one member of the jury put it.

Walkthrough of Our Design Process Background work

As soon as we knew we were accepted to take part in the competition, we started to work on the challenge. We did a lot of background research and dug as deep as we could. We read several reports and studies. We made phone calls to police officers and non-profit organizations that have a lot of experience in working with immigrants and minorities. Piece by piece, we found out important information related to our design challenge.

We also collected and discussed our own previous knowledge. The request for a female inspector, which started this story, was a true case that happened to Jaakko about a year ago. He was scheduled to make a fire inspection in an institution for immigrant women. If a male fire inspector might be too intimidating for them, can you imagine them to walk to a police station and report a crime, most likely meeting a severe-looking policeman behind the desk asking them all kinds of questions about the uncomfortable, maybe even humiliating situation they encountered? Can you picture her trusting him? We couldn’t. It became obvious very soon that we were dealing with quite a wicked problem that had to be approached holistically.

Personas and Stakeholder Map

We used many different service design tools in our design process. After a quick brainstorm and a lot of post-its in Jaakko’s living room window, we decided to create personas. They turned out to be a great starting point. “Ali”, “Cagri” and “Zahra” helped us greatly throughout the process. Their images in mind, we were able to empathize and hold a user-centric focus.

Early on, we started also to create a stakeholder map including all the service providers, non-profit organizations, institutions, and facilities that were relevant for potential crime victims. We figured that since they already are in touch with our target group, they could act as “fixers” for victims of racist crimes.

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