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This week’s weeknote will a be a bit shorter, because noteworthy things this week consisted mostly of presentations, events and blog posts. Or maybe because the weekend was dominated by Vappu, the Finnish Mayday, a country wide celebration of workers.

This week Panu released two blog posts: UX leadership insight #15: You and the series ending UX leadership insight: wrap-up. Be sure to read and understand them, you’ll become a better design lead and designer in the process. Panu will soon also be iterating around the same concepts in the UX Lx conference in Portugal. If you are going, come meet him and rest of the Nordkapp UX Lx team there.

On Tuesday Sami gave a talk about Agile to a group of Product Owners at our client’s. He’s also going to talk more about that topic in the same UX Lx conference.

Sami tested the waters with the Finnish version of his UX Lx presentation about combining agile methodology with interaction design by giving a talk to our client’s product owners. Went down really well, and the English premiere of the same thing will be in week and a half in Lisbon.

On Wednesday Matti, Sami & me attended Kick Off event of Luovimo, a Finnish project that aims to help creative companies go international. The keynote speaker was inspiring mr. Roger Mavity who gave a funny talk about pitching. Other companies included in the program include ACE-Production, Aivan, Backstage Music Factory, Blue Media, Casual Continent, Citynomadi, GigsWiz.com, Idean Enterprices, Matila Röhr Nordisk, Miltton, Nordic Drama Corner, PES-Arkkitehdit, Produs, S.E.O.S Design, Songhi Entertainment, Stereoscape, Tarinatalo, Toothpick and Undo. We look forward to working with them. The event was described as “Luovimo picks out creative elite” in the Finnish advertising media M&M. While that sounds a bit posh it’s funny because it’s true.

On Thursday Sami & me gave a talk about information design in the design school in Lahti. The audience was half students, half professionals. The school churns out the best graphic designers in Finland on a regular basis, who apparently originally commented on our presentations that the topics “sounded scary”, but they also considered them visually cool and interesting. Sami talked about data, context and information design while I talked about urban screens and how research is transformed into interactive design. Hopefully our talks gave them inspiration to go interactive and gave them trust in their skills. Basic concepts of visual design are very similar in print and digital after all. We also learned good points about information design and data visualization from Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest news paper in Finland. A nice and varied seminar in total.

On Friday we had our internal demo day. We heard in depth presentations of design processes behind few recent big projects Nordkappers have been doing. Special mention go to Panu & Matti, who have been doing long lasting and good work on the project Oslo. Aki presented an design evolution timeline of a old, large web service that coincidentally I have been working on as well sometime around 2000. Its latest incarnation is now fully designed in Nordkapp and will become public sometime in the future. Sami & me also recapped our Lahti presentations for others. After the demo day people escaped to the city for their Vappu celebrations.

Old space

By the way, Ii you are interested what happened to our previous office you can read all about in the Helsinki Design Lab weeknotes. Helsinki Design Lab is an initiative by Sitra, The Finnish Innovation Fund, to “advance strategic design as a new discipline in tackling the problems of the interdependent world”. We are happy to give them a venue for their work.

That’s it for now. Until next week!