Here are all the albums I’ve made during the project, one for each stage. Enjoy!
SSI – Research Methods workshop
SSI – Presentation Skills workshop
SSI – Presenting selected ideas
Some time has passed already since our final presentations workshop.
I haven’t managed to write about it, but luckily Cathy Nangini did, on the Aalto Social Impact blog, . Cathy, who is very much involved with a social project herself, wrote a wonderful article about the wrap-up event and about our project. Thanks Cathy!
Read the SSI project wrap-up article here. I will try to come back with photos and results soon.
I’m back…Here is the presentation from the Hub team.
And here is the Sofia presentation:
The project is slowly coming to an end, and all that hard work that the teams have put into it will be showing its results soon.
So, ladies and gentleman, we invite you to the School of Social Innovation final presentation! Come to see what solutions the Sofia team has come up with for improving the lives of the elderly, or what ways The Hub team has found to improve the Hub space, or what approaches the Future Scenarios team has invented to visualize the future!
The event will happen on Tuesday, the 27th of April, 18.00, at Hub Helsinki, Aleksanterinkatu 16-18 (inner yard, door with ‘Hub’ sign). Please try to be 10 mins early, if possible.
The event is open to everyone interested! And don’t worry about space, there’s plenty of that at the Hub!
See you there!
Found this really interesting article through @twitter today, in which Jon Kolko talks about the thinking behind his Austin Center for Design:
The Strange Connection between Entitlement, Social Innovation, and Interaction Design
This is very relevant to the School of Social Innovation, and (who knows?) could even support the thesis.
On Wednesday, all the teams presented a selection of their best ideas, to get some feedback on them from all of us. Personally, I was really impressed with their work. It seems that the time they spent on Tuesday to prepare for this really paid off!
Then we talked a bit about prototyping and communicating ideas, since this is the phase that has now started. We only had a small intro to prototyping - I’ll probably go into more details with each team separately, since they all have so different projects.
I guess the teams have been looking forward to this part – finally doing something concrete 
Let’s see how it goes!
Yesterday, we had the ideation workshop. The workshop that everyone had been waiting for, it was probably also the most enjoyable so far. We started with a bit of theory, then Janne worked on our self-confidence with his centering technique, then we had a couple of warm-up exercises of lateral thinking and individual brainstorming.
Then the hard-core part came. We all brainstormed together on each of the 3 cases. We got a solid number of ideas down on post-its; it should be a good starting point for each of the teams.
embedded by Embedded Video
vimeo Direkt
embedded by Embedded Video
vimeo Direkt
After a few days, we met again, and all the teams showed their research results. They hadn’t had much time available, but they all had some good initial results. And two of the teams were eager to practice the presentation skills learned in the previous workshop
In this workshop I tried to also include a technique for visually organizing and synthesizing research results, but, as has happened in some other occasions, I tried to do too much in too little time, so we didn’t get to properly do that by the time the workshop ended.
Then came the presentations skills workshop, held by my colleague from Futurice, Ville Saarinen. Ville is a very good presenter himself, and he taught us the basic principles of preparing a slide set. After a short presentation, Ville gave the students an exercise, which covered the rest of the workshop.
I think it’s safe to say everyone had a great time, and learned a few things about making good presentations.
embedded by Embedded Video
vimeo Direkt
Wow, some time has passed since I’ve updated the blog. I guess with so much interesting stuff going on, this became a second priority for a while. But here are the updates now…
First, we had the research workshop. We learned various ethnographic research methods – some of which I knew from D school, some of them inspired by IDEO’s toolkit.
The mood was informal and playful:
…But we also got to the serious business:
After a short exercise of interviewing each other and analyzing the process together, the teams were getting ready to interview old ladies, futuristic clients, and Hub users, each according to their own team’s challenge.
