Ending of Course with Superb Guest Lecture

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In this post, I am going to share my overall experience on course of Open and User innovation and my feedback on our Guest lecture ‘Anna Rosling Rönnlund’, founder of Gapminder.

First of all, the real reason why I have joined this course was that we had one lecture related to Entrepreneurship for Engineers course which was given by Mr. Serdar. In that lecture, I got really impressed by the way he interacted with students. He made us to participate in the class by calling us with our names which was very impressive and unique for me in this European culture of studies. So I made my final decision to attend the course on Open and User innovation, though I did not know the ABC of it.

Being an introvert by nature, I was a little shy during the first few classes. But Serdar was so kind and encouraging that I started to participate in the class. I have enjoyed learning in that class because everyone was so nice and friendly. I really thank you everyone in the class for being so kind and helpful. I have learned a lot from our classmates. They were very confident and informative. Some of you knew a lot about innovation which had inspired me a lot.

Mr.Serdar has a very different way of teaching and dealing with the students. He has answered all the questions very elaborately and clearly and I can say now proudly that I know the basics and core concepts of open and user innovation. It has widened my way of thinking and looking at things in a different way. Most importantly, it has given me confidence and helped me to improve my communication skills which I think would definitely help me in my career.

Now let’s come to the great lecture given to us today ( 2nd December 2015) by one of the Gapminder’s owner Anna Rosling. We met her before the class and I found her very charming and inspiring person. Her colleague Jasper was also very nice. The nice thing was that he was also an EIT ICT student. J. Mr. Serdar introduced us with her by calling us with our names that felt very nice to me.

Anna Rosling started her presentation on Gapminder and DollarStreet Project by showing us very cool pictures and interacting with us by asking some questions included in one of their surveys. That really helped me to understand that our perception on world’s statistics and income or health of people worldwide in different nations is actually wrong. We should have an effective way to visualize the world’s economic conditions based on different nations. Vizabi project is also an interesting project to visualize the data in different forms. Anna showed us the data on different household items used by families of different income levels. I think that data can help us to locate those people and help them to lead a better life. The data generated by DollarStreet can provide opportunities to organizations and agencies to tackle the poverty and other problems in the world effectively.

Last but not the least, it was a great end of the course. This course has provided me a lot of good memories and knowledge and I will cherish those precious moments throughout my life.

Thanks a lot everyone J

Images may worth a thousand of words

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Today’s guest lecture by Anna Rosling Rönnlung has received great attention from the ME1033 audience. The ex-senior UX designer at Google and co-founder of GapMinder Foundation has presented the main vision of her company : fight devastating ignorance. It sounds like a huge entreprise. But they seem to be on the right track. In short, their core value is to give access to knowledge using images, pictures and good visualization.

Dollar Street is Anna’s main focus at the moment. This GapMinder startup gathers pictures of items and houses from all around the World. The idea is to make “everyone’s standard of living understandable with pictures”. There is no point of trying to explain it with words then; the following TEDx video will speak by itself.

Anna invited Jasper to join the lecture. Employee at GapMinder and just graduated from KTH two days ago, he gave us an insight of their visualization platform. The open-sourced tool converts data into bubbles, mountains or different sort of charts that render access to statistics more enjoyable. He pinpointed their wish in improving their service using collaborative and open innovation among the users.

After the two presentations, the students asked many interesting questions. Some of those were critical and challenging, which also showed Anna’s skill to be able to bounce back and give reliable answers. Dollar Street will be released by the beginning of next year. There are a lot of ideas and projects when looking at the future. The main one is to create a Dollar Street community that would share pictures and add content in the database. Another – and this is the one I like the most – would be to gather data over years to create a chronicle of GPS-coordinates.

I deeply think that visual have great impact on people. Convert numbers into nice charts help to understand the data. But Dollar Street goes even further: by using pictures, they manage to compare and analyse the social and ethnological diversity in a very creative way. Images may worth a thousand of words. As long as it is well used. I guess this will be the main challenge for Dollar Street in the coming years: keeping integrity in all the data they will collect and stay unbiased in the way they’ll combine them.

Céline

Google Meetup on Game development

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On 26th of November, I got a chance to go to a tech meetup organised by Google at the King office on the topic : “How we slashed the time and still develop awesome games?” This meetup was about a new public game engine Defold released by King. The main aim of King was to make the developers aware of this new engine and demonstrate some cool features of this gaming engine.

King is the company that created candy crush and recently got acquired by Activision for $5.9 billion. This information was my main motivation to go to the meetup and the get the chance to see the King office.

I would first start with the King office. Being a gaming company the office of King was really cool from all standards. The whole office seemed like a digital playground with slides, swings and great environment. Here is an image of their lobby that looks like an amusement park.

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As for the meetup, it was highly technical. The participation was primarily from game developers. 2 of King’s in house developers of the gaming engine presented the “cool” features of their new gaming engine – Defold. The crowd participation was also good and there was a lively discussion on the advantage of this gaming engine over conventional and more more accepted ones like Unity. The overall crowd was filled with industry professionals with a very few participation from the students (5-6). For me as a designer, it was really cool to see how the design philosophy changes for the developer as they were more specific about the crash reports, debugging, etc.

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Key Take Away

These meetups are great way for the companies to showcase their new technology to the specific target crowd. At the same time it is a good opportunity for the people interested in this topic to get information from the developers of the technology.

However for me it was the experience of going to the King’s office, getting a chance to see the technical side of a game development company and lastly free beers and wraps. 😉