Since the last weeknote our workforce has swelled with the long-anticipated arrival of two new Nordkappers. One is pumped up, buoyant and a little creepy while the other is more lethargic and deflated. Both are settling in nicely.

Research, research

Last week Tia and Kate hopped over to Berlin to present research and participate in a client workshop for an ongoing project. The research period was five weeks long and the main challenge lay in condensing the information gathered from ten interviews (which spawned twenty hours of recordings and 150 pages of transcript). Everyone has their own filtration process and ours involved covering a wall with lots of scribbles. Anyway, the presentation went well, and the accompanying workshop proved that the groundbreaking project involved is well on track.

Design review

As is typical in a busy office, the fast pace means that we can sometimes lose sight of what other teams have been delivering. In a bid to catch up we held an internal project and design review on Thursday afternoon [pictured]. Project boards were displayed and leads gave short fifteen minute presentations of work from the past couple of months, which was then subjected to open review and discussion. The work presented ranged from reshaping businesses at a high strategic level to polishing fine details, and although the majority of our projects are NDA-restricted it was nice just to showcase them internally and congratulate the people involved.

It’s important to us that the standards which our clients have come to expect from our work are upheld, and this is reflected in our new internal design review framework which Sami presented during the session. The framework is a reminder to ourselves that all decisions, large or small, that we make in the course of our work must be justifiable. Blog post to come.

Business as usual

Last week Tia attended an international service design conference in Espoo. As has been mentioned in previous weeknotes, we have established a long-term service design partnership with a new client so the conference provided a good opportunity to see where the industry is heading and how other companies view service design.

This week sees Matti and Akseli wrapping up their major ‘hush hush’ project with help from Jukka and Tia. They gave the rest of us a sneak preview and it’s astonishing how ‘new’ their proposal is. It really feels like they are on the cusp of something exciting: this one is definitely a game-changer.

Jukka and Panu have been rebranding and designing concepts for a renewed customer loyalty programme, during the course of which Jukka was let down by Google Images in his search for ‘bonus model’ benchmarks. They have also been working with Aki to finalise an interesting health industry project.

Teppo and Fabian have been designing services to benefit charitable organisations. With Ilkka they also created a totally new business model that marries two major industries for a huge mutual benefit. Representatives from each of these industries are eager to get started on this joint venture, but there’s still a long road ahead.

Sami was a member for the Vuoden Huiput (Best of the Year) jury for the ‘innovative media and environment’ category and was invited to give a talk about data visualisation as a business case in April. He has also been finalising content for the two day IxD Intensive training programme at Aalto Pro in April. Clients and peers ahoy!

Oh, and a brief immersion in the world of American football also rounded off the week!

Water cooler chat

Conversation in the office this week touched on the Ixonos TV Compass concept, which naturally caught our attention in relation to our SuomiTV project. Teppo made the valid point that implementing such a concept will be difficult without being well-positioned in that sphere: a position already occupied by Apple. Similar ‘internet tv’ offerings from Google, Samsung and Philips were also discussed, as well as the greater umbrella topic of television as a ‘soon-to-be-rethought-market’. We’re keeping our eyes open.

Next week is Finland’s national ski holiday, so if you’re one of the lucky ones heading away we hope you have a good one (we hear Nordkapp is nice this time of year). We have some designer power available for March so if you have a project we could possibly help you with, contact Ilkka.

‘Til next time!

Travelling

Sami’s heading to Interaction12 conference in Dublin to give a compact talk called “Input/Output: Interaction design at the intersection of city and its interfaces” — 10 key findings from our work on designing services for the city of Helsinki. Say hi to him if you’re going to this major event!

Elsewhere, Kate & Tia are travelling to Germany soon to work on a project. German friends, heads up!

Invisible City & WDC

There’s also a big event in Helsinki this weekend. Invisible City gathers people and companies working with open data for a long event that lasts long into the night. There’s workshops for working with data, and a seminar where many organizations like Helsinki Region Infoshare, Apps4Finland, IBM, Fjord and Kokoro & Moi talk about open data, data visualization, trends and designing for a city.

Our participation in Invisible City is two-fold. First Tia & Kate will talk about Urbanflow in the seminar, and later in the night, Matti will be one of the judges in the Cut & Paste Helsinki design competition. This could be a fun competition, so make sure to stay around for it and the party later on.

The whole event is part of a bigger World Design Capital (WDC) Helsinki Open Doors Weekend that features 180 events, in which you can “Sit down with the designer at a pie bar or tea party, participate in the design processes intended for the general public.”

Sounds fun, right? We do that every day. :)

FastCoDesign

Oh, and we also got featured as Infographic of the Day on FastCompany’s Co.Design section with Urbanflow, our cooperation project with Urbanscale. It’s a fun first for us, even though the article writer is (of course) unaware of some of our research findings which have lead to some of the design features.

• Co.Design: Urbanflow Aims To Turn Cities Into Playgrounds For Interactive Infographics

Until next time and next adventures!

Last week I was in the Metropolia Polytechnic to spar students of an innovation course. Another person with me from the “real life entrepeneur / business side” was Perttu Tolvanen, an independent CMS expert and consultant, and of Vierityspalkki.fi fame.

We were both amazed and surprised by the general quality of the students’ work. The best of the projects were really close to professional level in their thinking and implementation. This was probably because these were third year students, with only the last year of studies left, and many of them already worked in various companies. “Innovation” was taken as a loose term, as it should, and solutions included an actually produced full-on premium magazine, a mobile based hookup/party/friend application (think Foursquare API+X), simple & user friendly Google Calendar add-on, student information & memory sharing website, an iPhone game with 8bit Nintendo graphics, and others.

Later on we discussed with the teacher Eeva Meltio over lunch. She told us about what teaching is like nowadays. For example, there’s four (!) different teachers on this course. They all bring in their own special skills, like interaction or graphic design, and teach and spar the students in that field. They also all hangaround all day in specific student groups in Facebook and exchange information and ideas constantly with the students. Eeva told that this kind of shared teaching responsibility is still actually surprisingly harder, not easier, for the teachers, because there’s so much cooperation, shared decisions and communication to do. But apparently the students are happy and get flooded with good mix of influences from various fields at the same time. The students also do real project work for companies and public sector during the courses.

All this might require a lot from the teachers, yes, but somehow to me it sounded like we are potentially witnessing the next breakthrough in Finnish education somehow. Mixing various things in one go can potentionally give the students more realistic view of how (design) work is done in the real world. It’s never just plain graphic design you can concentrate on for example. In real world everything depends on everything else and it’s a sort of balancing act to constantly produce something really good on time and on budget. Honing good skills in your own strong field is important too, but more often than not real (design) work is about understanding other fields too and moving fluently between them when your team needs you to.

What coders and users have been up to

Sauli worked with pitches for clients in the insurance and beverage sector. He also participated in a session where it was the developers’ time to show us how well they have implemented our interaction and layout designs and what is the overall status of the web service project that is due to be launched during the spring. This project is kind of heavy on the implementation side and there is two tech houses responsible for it. Apparently things are progressing well here.

Tia, Johanna, Sauli and Panu went to another city in Finland to observe and analyze how people move and behave while spending time in our client’s premises, and how are they using the available services. Of course they couldn’t just stand there looking, instead they had a little fun for themselves too. You could also call this Mystery Shopping.

The team will soon present their findings and new concepts to the client. They’ll describe how to improve the existing space and its services so that the whole experience would be better for the users and how our client’s business would improve as a result.

We have committed to collaborate with this client for a long time and that’s a good thing because there is a lot of work to be done. If only for the fact that the client has several similar spots all around Finland. It would be good to observe all or at least several of them. Not to mention that they have a huge web service that we are just waiting to get our hands on.

Boom!

Boom boom baby boom. Production of next generation of Nordkappers is again on the way. There’s three (!) new babies expected to arrive this year. One of us will be a second-rounder and then there’s two newcomers to the parenthood business. All the best, congratulations and good luck to all of them! Let’s get back to this topic at later date.

Until next time.

Kate and Tia have been interviewing people for one very secret project recently. According to them they’ve had a good time sitting in cafés and talking to some very enthusiastic people. Sometimes design work rules, huh?

Kate says that Tia has made research interviews into an artform, and that she’s been learning a lot while working with Tia. Kate (who’s Irish) also says that “the Irish will talk to a wall if it seems to be listening”, and that actually being silent for a change and listening to these people has been eye-opening. I’m sure she’s exaggerating.

Kate is also involved in a copywriting/content case. Yep you guessed it, can’t say much about that either. This content is coming to a huge and visible website, but that’s about it.

Tia’s also organizing two days of research interviews and on-site observations outside of Helsinki. These are for that new big client of ours. This should help us get to grips with their users in their locations in different times of the day. This hints that the observations will continue late into the evening/night, which also means that it will again be another kind of a day at work for those who are going.

Tablets Tablets

A tediously negotiated iPad case is progressing finally. Hopefully the final budget can be agreed on soon, so that we can get started on this. I believe that this time we’ll actually get proper reference rights, and we’ll finally get to show you something tablet-y sometime during Spring. Wohoo! The project should be first of its kind in Finland.

There’s some other tablet pitches in the air currently. We’ve invented really good new business case for these clients already, even though the projects haven’t even started yet. That’s how excited we are already about these.

Quickies

Jukka + Sami went to Augmented Reality camp and came back with a cool, yet early, demo of an audio based AR app. A good approach to already-boring AR field, where in general everybody always wants — and has wanted to for the last several years — to build a visual layer/icons on top of a video feed. Gosh, even we’ve designed things like that years ago. The visual AR has been in the works for so long that it’s good to see at least our guys coming up with something new already.

Teppo is going to Metropolia University of Applied Sciences to review student projects from an innovation course on Thursday. There seems to be quite a variation in projects from magazines to iPhone games and social media services. Should be interesting.

We recently got the number one spot in an app store. As usual, we can’t say which app it was. Oh well.

By the way, an engineer friend recently commented our blog in a chat: “The blog is really fun. Reading about interesting things is a great break from the chores of engineering work.” Good to hear and perhaps this is so, but please try to make your work interesting too. There’s no reason engineering work should be boring by definition. The whole world was built by engineers. Go build something exciting!

Until next time.

Photo credit: Old Irish wall in Ireland

Late last year that revolutionary project got that seal of approval go-ahead and Akseli & Matti have been working hard on that. They spend much of their time at the client’s place to be close to the action. This is not a common way we do design, but sometimes it is just easiest and fastest that way. Since we are very flexible in general, this is doable for us as well. Sadly there’s nothing we can say about this project, really. Except that the feedback in design reviews and otherwise have been really good.

Another project has reached a high-level review stage as well. This has included quite a lot of travel, especially for Sami. The project continues through Spring most likely. Not much we can say about this either, except, that feedback has again been super good.

Elsewhere, a WP7 application for another client was designed quickly, and is also in the review pipeline. This should be released some time quite soon.

Late last year also saw the release of the second platform of a tablet thing done by Fabian and Teppo. These both gained an apparently immediate adoption by the users of the respective service. Regarding these; a good quote for your next design-sales presentation from a user was:

“Because of this app, I will NOT end my subscription as I was planning, but stay as a user!”

A text book example of the importance and benefit of good design, huh?

So all and all, there’s been quite a lot of mobile application work recently. But we haven’t forgotten about mobile websites either. In fact, there’s several on-going discussions about high-class mobile websites for clients who absolutely need to target a larger audience, or who have tight timelines where app development is simply not feasible.

A bit of a different case is a medical web service project for professional health care. This non public service is targeted for the Nordic countries. Team here is mostly Jukka, Panu and Aki.

Remember that huge public entity we won a multi year deal with? Those projects are slowly starting to start [sic]. Possibilities here are interesting as there’s so much elements outside of screens. There’s floor plans and architecture involved, for example. Instead of starting designing straight away, we plan to see how we could help the client first sort out their internal processes for maintaining their existing services. Then progress to processes for developing new services, and only then actually to developing those services. But let’s see how this goes, we have only begun to scratch the surface of this huge entity.

By the way, if you missed Sami’s recent post 10 things for 2012, please continue to reading that, and you’ll know what you’re supposed to be doing this year. :)

Until next time.

Photo credit: Blues by Panu

Previously, we proposed year 2011 being the year of the mobile. It’s happening, albeit not quite as fast as we expected mostly due bad economy. Here is our take on 2012, divided into three themes —larger contexts, if you wish— we see as the most dominant catalysts for the change for the industry and ordinary consumers alike.

1. The year of the mobile web

As mobile devices with a proper browser—smartphones, dumbphones and tablets— will gain momemtum, corporations face a situation where their existing and potential consumers will be able to access web from everywhere, not just from behind their computer.

The Joe Average being more aware of mobile means also less opportunities to sell individual screens to home — many of the energy monitors are failing already. People don’t want additional screens in their homes, especially when most of the tasks handled by them can designed to be accessed anywhere through a mobile device.

More;
• Trendwatching.com: 12 trends for 2012 / Screen culture

2. Redux of location-based commerce

Hyperlocal targeting has for a few years now been the wet dream of advertisers. While it’s hard to imagine a feasible mass market scenario around this, the smartest companies will see this as an opportunity to offer better and more relevant service to their customers. Others try to jump the moving train but fail miserably when using the same tactics as in paid advertising. The ones who play this right by being respectful towards the context and understanding the necessary hyginene factors such as privacy will rise up as champions in both business sense and as increased commercial value linked directly to their tactful interaction with their customers.

3. Diversification of mobile

Android and Windows Phone will offer iOS an alternative. iOS will remain the strongest commercial platform but WP will catch up due MS+Nokia marketing effort. Elsewhere, browser-based hybrid application will start taking over iOS gates. In order to compete with this, Windows Mobile will up the ante by revamping IE Mobile for WP Apollo.

THEME 2: From data to making meaning

Open data movement has been gaining steady movement throughout the year, and the public eye has seen many great visualisations which will bring them more aware of the potential that lies in making the invisible visible, and yet better, meaningful.

4. Everything that can be software, will be.

The airline industry is changing enterprise systems to tablets, cars become cellphones where you sit in, and all is connected through ubiquitous wireless networks. Fiction? Not quite, but the today here and now. This change will have huge implications to industries it hasn’t disrupted yet — mostly enterprise solutions and any physical goods that either are outdated fast or require shipping long distances. Also related: 3D printing and scanning.

More;
• CNET: Marc Andreessen’s view of the world boils down to software

5. Quantified Self

Most of the things us humans do can now be measured in numbers, in a way or another. We are in essence becoming information organisms, our location can and will be tracked through mobile devices, transactions and browser logins. We know the air quality around us, the nutrition we have daily and so forth. The devices we carry start being aware of when we sleep, walk, run and sit still for too long.

As GigaOM’s Connected Consumer-whitepaper states, “Part of this shift means that the body is shareable, at least in terms of information and data.” Anthropologists refer to this as “biological citizenship, and social networking platforms enable even those individuals with rare disorders, such as Crohn’s disease or Huntington’s disease, to reach out across the world and find others who share their conditions.”

This all presents a huge opportunity space for designers and companies to tap into. How can we make our lives better by understanding the implications of our everyday actions to our lives as a whole? The key here is to not concentrate on just narcissitic self-observation but to step up a few notches from just pure data into making the mundane meaningful. How might we best remove the complexity of apps, platforms and manual input from here? And as Jawbone’s failure with their smart bracelet UP shows, the interaction design around connected personal objects isn’t easy.

• More: Nike+, Jawbone UP, Withings
• The Internet Gets Physical @ NYT

6. Conversational Computing

Us humans tend to project ourselves to inanimate objects such as interfaces and interactive systems. We feel software is more human than it really is, and humanize the interactions we engage in. Computers behave badly, ATMs have a teasing character. Designers and software developers are already taking advantage of this through designing behaviour and dialogue into interactive systems. Apple takes this even further with Siri, a powerful speech recognition algorithm with huge variety of hand-tailored answers for added quirkiness and — human feel.

More;
• Apple Siri
• BASAAP
• Think: Product personas

THEME 3: Magical realities

By tapping into the two previous themes, designers and companies are able to offer new magical realities to people. In some this means increased opportunities in transactions — monetary or otherwise—, to some new ways to interact with the world around us.

7. Personal commerce

The data available from the transactions and in the cloud offers merchants more and better opportunities to connect with their customers. Ideally,your merchant knows enough of you to serve you better. For example, Square’s Cardcase enables two-way, personal dialogue with the customer and the merchant. Other, bigger companies will find to tap into this as well— some through replicating Square’s model or utilizing technology such as NFC.

More;
• Square Cardcase
• The Verge: Paypal trialing NFC retail system in Sweden

8. Augmented reality

…but not the way you think. As a concept, AR has much more potential than just contextually overlayed POIs on top of live image. The best way to describe this is reality can be seen a platform to leverage the context by anchoring it to real world constraints.

Dentsu’s Suwappu explores augmented storytelling through using toys as markers. Shadow Cities use the real world location as a platform for MMMORPG and magic. Sky View app for iOS amplifies the real world with near-magical information we didn’t expect to be visible.

More;
• Suwappu
• Shadow Cities
• Sky view

9. Added computation

Like we anticipated a year ago, sensorial interaction is gaining momemtum. The year 2011 has seen a lot of new products and services taking advantage of different personal sensors and display devices. The basic sensor technologies are now fairly well-developed and stable, so the time is right for software-led innovation. NFC is on its way already — big merchants like Visa are waking up to smaller challengers such as Paypal and Square. Urban informatics and the data cities collect is being opened up. For designers, this means a lot of new opportunities to innovate. The easiest way to do this is to rethink existing objects and technologies through added computation and combining many single-bit interactions into new interactive systems.

More;
• Twine @ Kickstarter
• BERG’s Little Printer

To sum it up, what do these themes mean then?

For brands and companies this sets interesting challenges: as the branding has to carry throughout different platforms, the devil is even more in the details and how the brand behaves, talks and interacts with your throughout different digital, physical and spatial touchpoints. As sustainability is dead, replaced by cradle-to-cradle thinking and renewability, just inventing and producing new physical things isn’t sustainable for any longer.

For content providers it will both a threat and an opportunity. It is now easier than ever to reach out to new and existing customers, but as the world gets more complex, the absolute control is harder, and competition tougher. The winners will go back to basics; quality, transparency and courage to find their soul and project it to every touchpoint over interaction with people.

For designers, the world is wide open. The world opening up it’s onion-like layers of data and behaviour presents opportunities to both improve the existing and invent new, disruptive things. Despite the economy, there are lots of opportunities to be had.

I can’t believe how fast weeks fly you’re deep in projects. It seems it’s time for another two-week weeknote and a lot has happened again.

Apps4Finland

Few of us visited the Apps4Finland open data & data visualization competition gala at Vanha. We didn’t participate, but one entry had been inspired quite a lot by our work. You can try to find which one from The list of winners of Apps4Finland 2011 competition. All the best to them and to all of the winners! :)

The level of entries was pretty good in the top end. Some of our favorites were:

• ParkkiNappi by Neligrate Oy — which removed coins from the car parking equation by using a mobile app.
• Helsinki Public Transport Visualized was a clear world class winner in the visualization category.
• Miten menee, kunta? — or how are the Finnish municipalities doing? — was a clear enough Google Maps presentation about the major issues in the Finnish country side.
• Tilannekuva.fi was an interesting in-your-face unsolicited redesign work for anational crisis information web service — a one that was decided to build in 2005 after the Asian Tsunami, yet is still not implemented in 2011(!).
• soRvi — a toolkit for simplifying JSON, XML and PC-axis data input to the R programming language. This should make further processing easier.

Sadly all entries are described only in Finnish.

The gala had many moments of people patting each other in the back for doing good work in advancing open data in Finland. And it seems that celebration was in order as the competition had drawn in more participants than any other national open data competition so far. That’s a good result in as small country as Finland. In the words of Petri Kola: “This has been the breakthrough year for open data in Finland”.

We really want to find some time to do some open data visualizations at some point too, but in the meantime we’ll do them for our clients.

Lots of mobile stuff shipped and in-progress

We’ve been really busy in the mobile space again.

For example, a recent multi-platform mobile application designed by Kate, Sauli, Fabian, Aki was released some time ago and was the most downloaded free app in the Apple AppStore for some time. It seemed to have filled a large user need within that crowd.

A long tablet project that Fabian and Teppo have been doing was also finally launched in one app store. Coming out also on another platform soon. Designing for two different platforms at the same time is challenging, very interesting and educational, but requires quite a lot more work than one could perhaps think. It’s interesting to see how tablet UI concepts from one platform are copied & improved in another platform, before they are again copied & improved and ported back to the original platform. And your design lives somewhere in between of these.

We’re also heavily involved in Windows Phone design again. Jukka and Sami are doing a quite cool project which is just a start for a new product line expansion for this client. This has solid base in research and strategical thinking.

Fabian and Teppo are doing another WP7 thing, which needs to be done according to the strictest rules possible this time. This also makes the project quite challenging, as Microsoft’s own specifications for the platform still have some inconsistencies, although the situation has improved a lot from 7.0 to 7.5 Mango.

Anyhow, if you are in need of some mobile design, contact us, we are on a roll currently!

Competitions

It seems that Urbanflow has found its way into a Postscapes — Internet of Things Design Fiction video competition. At the moment some story telling chair is leading the voting, though. Check it out, the competition has some interesting videos in it, although you might have seen many of them already.

Elsewhere, Sami participated to Peloton Innovation Camp, which is a series of events aiming to find practical solutions for the climate change and the energy crisis. It’s organized by the think tank Demos Helsinki and Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, and supported by many organizations.

In the Helsinki event Sami was in a team that won the shared second price for their project Voimala, a mobile energy app (b2c) and a virtual power plant(b2b). The winner was an innovative ad-hoc car sharing pool Weego, aimed at ulitilizing dormant vehicles by larger group of people. This was “kind of airbnb but for cars”. Good job, hopefully it will be created for real.

That’s it for now, see you next time.

After having a second baby in the family, I’m back from some luxurious paternity leave time that Finland has to offer. Actually, I’ve been back for some time now, but getting back to grips with weeknotes is apparently a step harder now that one’s sleep time is drastically cut, again. Nevertheless, a small baby is always a quite cute thing to have around.

Things of National Importance

Good news in the national service design front. We won a cool, multi-year deal to be the selected service designers for a big “governmental organization”, let’s say. We and them are eager to get projects rolling already, but it seems this stuff will mostly get going next year. This is quite important, since the huge money this organization moves around is actually used for the benefit of the Finnish people, especially the ones who are not so well off. It’s good to be a part of doing something good.

We also managed to get ourselves into talks with another big national player. If everything goes well we might one day be improving a service or two you hate so much today. But this might take long to materialize. But I’m actually quite surprised how easily we got into this position in the first place. I guess since the big de facto players in this field are now so tarnished because of their constant failures that people feel it’s time to try something new for a change. I support this line of thought.

On-going and Upcoming

There’s good bunch of projects for Windows Phone 7 going on at the moment for various clients. And implementation support for a tablet case. About four TV related projects too.

There’s a really nice revolutionary project in the pipeline, starting in December and last for few months. This would have not national, but really international effect. The selected team is quite excited about this already, although it still needs a final seal of approval [pictured above].

2012 Interaction Awards

In case you missed it, Nordkapp and Urbanscale are shortlisted in the 2012 Interaction Awards with the Urbanflow thing. No matter what happens in the competition, it’s awesome to see us among companies like Frog, Nokia, R/GA, HUGE, Microsoft and so on. I’d like to congratulate the Umea Institute of Design, a great IXD school from our neighboring country Sweden, for being on the list too!

Photo credit: Sealed friendship by Andrea

Akseli’s been working on a super secret skunk works project for a startup client of ours with Panu. That’s all I can say :)

Sauli, Teppo, Fabian and Kate have been working on a few projects for a large client of ours. The context is the same, work includes several different screens and input devices, and it’s actually quite cool.

Panu’s been working on some serious corporate stuff, more precicely processes. Due to certain client demands we at the management team have gone through a lot of hoops on figuring and building processes on how to handle a lot of things from everyday stuff like security to more serious anomalies and black swans. You might ask what place does hardcore corporate stuff like this have in a lean and mean design firm? The way we see it, the better we have figured out the dull stuff and then put out of the way *until* the imaginary poop hits the tube, the more we can concentrate on the value we generate for our clients and collaborators.

Tia, Jukka and myself have been wrapping up the consumer study we did a while ago, and are carrying on with the design part of things.

Another thing we’ve all discussed a lot around the office is our point of view(s). We have to be able to offer our clients better and more efficient processes, new concepts which offer better reach and engagement, and overall help them to digitalise their business so that the core itself won’t suffer but instead things will turn out better for all. This is our change to leave a dent into this world, and we will be more opinionated about these things in the future. These are our lead bullets.

Something we also did last week was to reinvent the way we sell our work. Quite exciting, you’ll hear about this soon in our next meeting.

In other news, we also hosted the October IxDA Helsinki at the office. Since the date coincided the first national Fail Day, we thought IxDA should support that notion as well and we themed the day #failIxDA. This worked our quite nicely, we had approximately 50-60 ppl at the office listening short talks about failure. For full disclosure, I am one of the local IxDA Leaders, and the next events will be hosted by Activeark in November, and by Sitra in December.

Right after the IxDA, we had the pleasure of also having multimedia students from the Lahti Institute of Design drop by at the office for a bit of an introduction on what we do, how we do it and then of course a few concrete case studies. Nice easy start for the morning right there.

Every now & then, our website earns its perks by being either partially or just blatantly ripped off. For a designer, someone copying your work can be a compliment. However, sometimes copying takes such amounts of douchebaggery things get ridiculous. This time, some clever fellas decided to copy our site completely and make it ugly. How did we find out? They left our Google Analytics code intact in the source. Nice work!

And last but not least, public engagements: Playful was held in London in the week before the last. I was honored to be invited there along with the likes of scifi author Al Robertson, Lousie Downe, Last.fm’s Matt Sheret, Naughty Dog‘s Richard LeMarchand (the lead designer for the Uncharted PS3 game series) and probably the best, and most provocative speaker of the day Georgina Voss. For more, see the Wired article, the Playful website and check out my slides below. Our friends Third Wave Berlin wrote a nice blog post about it, too.

Last week, I also gave a talk about Urbanflow Helsinki and urban informatics at Helsinki City Hall as a part of a workshop aiming to redesign the city portal. Check out the slides below:

That’s it for now— til the next time!

Photo credit: 2 year old has been using the iPad by Teppo

The saddest bit of news from the past few weeks is definitely the death of Steve Jobs. It’s fair to say this had a huge emotional impact on lot of people at the office. It does feel odd to be impacted by someone you never even closely met, but it’s fair to say our company would be very different without his work and the industries he basically re-invented. It is in the human nature to value people who impact and inspire us, and Steve Jobs have truly done so. So long Steve, thanks for all the fish. Your legacy will keep on insipiring us on the road ahead.

On a more positive note, other things that happened after the last weeknote: Tia + myself visited Picnic 11 in Amsterdam and enjoyed it greatly. Tia even managed to get a few interviews done for a customer study we’ve since finished. I met a bunch of brilliant people, talked and pitched Urbanflow a lot and generally enjoyed the vibe Picnic had to offer. Thank you all — a recap might follow at some stage.

Regarding Urbanflow, there are themes which seem to tap into some kind of underlying nerve on a much larger scale than we imagined. As a result, things might get real interesting soon. You’ll be the first to know.

Before popping off for a parental leave, Teppo + Fabian managed to ramp up the visual and interaction design for a tablet app they’d been working on.It’s for a large, longstanding client of ours, it’s awesome and will blow the roof of both iTunes and Android Market once it’s out. The cool thing with this project was that it was a fast, ambitious exercize on building on our client’s brand and transforming the core elements into solid digital brand style spanning across platforms. The guys say it’s about 80% there now. Making all this happen was a huge effort for the whole team but based on what I’ve seen, totally worth it. And a first Honeycomb project we’ve done, too. The software is gradually getting better, and it seems Android tablets might finally earn their wings on this one.

Meanwhile, Tia, Jukka, Sauli and myself have been working on a another large, fast paced project which has required some flying as well— both as a figure of speech and in concrete world as well. Our team is spread out in several locations but things seem to be working fine nevertheless. Somehow we’ve found ourselves in the middle of a post-corporate positivity vortex where everyone’s motivated and confident on the important piece they bring to the table. Big things. This might even be team’s chance to leave a dent to the world. Not much more to be shared for this for now— but here’s to hoping that day will come in not-that-distant future.

Matti’s been having a bit of time off enjoying his honeymoon for the past weeks. Los Angeles, Las Vegas and San Francisco. Based on his Facebook, all is well.

Bubbling under at the office: data visualisation, new business models, electronics and all kinds of interesting new things. More about that later. In the more near future, we’ll host an IxDA Helsinki event at our office this Thursday, Playful 11 in London next week and lots of other things to keep us busy. ’till the next time!