A short while ago I was in a short meeting with Riitta–a previous student of SSI–and Tiina, the director of elderly home Sofia. Riitta wanted some feedback and advice on a new project she’s trying to put together. The project, called Spinning Joy, is a sort of continuation to SSI, but specially adapted to fit elderly care homes, and focusing a bit more on participation, and social aspects. I find the project very relevant, Riita’s approach quite adequate, and the knowledge to be obtained extremely interesting. The only challenge, of course, will be financial: how to get buy-in from elderly homes and/or some kind of funding, so that all the work put into the project gets paid. Well, I really hope Riitta somehow pulls through, and I’m looking forward to her starting to spin out joy in different elderly homes in Finland!
After a 1 year break, things have started moving again with School of Social Innovation! The main highlights are: 1. we submitted a sponsorship application for Helsinki Design Capital 2011 and 2. I met new interesting people, and I have good feelings about what could come out of it!
At Global Service Jam 2011, I met Katja, the starter of Designers for Finland, who has some very similar interests in terms of using design to do good for the society; we were both a bit stuck with our efforts and needed some motivation, so we thought “what better way to get ourselves to move on with our efforts than to get paid for it?”…We met a few times, did some planning, decided on what projects we wanted to take on together, and then sent in the funding application. Fingers crossed, let’s hope we get the funding, and if we do, looking forward to three amazing design jams next year!
Speaking of Global Service Jam 2011, it was a pretty cool event, with a lot of design fun, and a lot to learn in terms of organizing design workshops. And the best part was of course meeting great people: as already said, there I met Katja, who I’m collaborating with now; also, I met Reima – from Palmu – who organized the event; Ritta, from SSI-Sofia we care, was also there. From what it seems, Reima and Riitta are now involved with organizing a design jam themselves, in which I may get involved. Also, I’m hoping we can get them involved in our project, just because they would both be perfect for it. Well, let’s wait and see how things develop!
Posted: May 9th, 2010 | Author:Sebi | Filed under:Diary | Comments Off
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!
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!
Posted: April 9th, 2010 | Author:Sebi | Filed under:Diary | Comments Off
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!
Posted: April 2nd, 2010 | Author:Sebi | Filed under:Diary | Comments Off
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.
Posted: April 2nd, 2010 | Author:Sebi | Filed under:Diary | Comments Off
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.
Let’s see how it goes!
