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!

SSI – Syy joint event

SSI – Project Kick-Off

SSI – Research Methods workshop

SSI – Presentation Skills workshop

SSI – Research results

SSI – Ideation

SSI – Presenting selected ideas

SSI – Final presentations

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!

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.

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!

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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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.