SSI is back!

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!

School of Social Innovation – project presentation slides

Final presentations summary

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:

Ideas in place. Ready to prototype!

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!

Ideation

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.

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Research results

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.

Presentation Skills Workshop

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.

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Research Workshop

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.

Project kick-off yesterday. Exciting!

It’s all coming together!

Today was amazing! With 2 days before project kick-off, everything seems to be coming together nicely!

First, I met with Jan-Henrik Johansson and Christine Chang, from the EU-funded BASAAR project. They had some very interesting problem case ideas, around immigration, globalization and future scenarios. They’ll be coming to the project kick-off on Thursday to introduce their ideas.

Next, I met Anne Badan and Anki (don’t have full name) from Aalto Social Impact, a project very similar in philosophy and desired outcome to this one, being set up  inside Aalto University. We discussed about each other’s projects and about possibilities of joining forces in the future. Anne is quite inspiring!

Finally, I attended the Social Innovation event organized by Syy at the Hub. Not only did we get a few more sign-ups for the project, but we also finally found a “client” for our senior-citizens area! Tiina Kuisma from Palvelukoti Sofia will also be coming on Thursday, to talk a bit about her organization and possible senior-citizen cases we could help with.

Not to mention, Janne from Hub Helsinki will also be chipping in a problem case, called “Hub Helsinki / Where unlikely allies meet”. More about it on Thursday.

To summarize, we’ve got a pretty good selection of real cases, and also some very enthusiastic people to start working on them. I’d say we’re good to go!