Stefan and me attended at a two-days workshop about design thinking that we would like to share with you. The name of the event was Design Thinking – Try It Out!. It was held on the 5th and 6th of December 2016, at the Impact Hub in Stockholm, by Neda Nordin.

The base idea of Design Thinking methodology is that one doesn’t need to be a designer to think like one. The workshop was created for people that are thinking about starting their own business, or run already but the growth is slow, and are not sure if they are solving the right problem. During the workshop attendees are expected to learn how to use techniques like human-centred interviewing, visual stories, experience mapping, ideation matrixes and rapid prototyping. This learning should be done in an atmosphere of radical collaboration and iterative learning.

During the two evening sessions – 4 hours each, attendees get an overview of the Design Thinking process in a mix of theory and practical exercises to:

1. Understand – discover user challenges and desires
2. Define – synthesize findings into insights
3. Ideate – turn insights into ideas and evaluate them
4. Prototype and test– explore and validate concepts.

On the first day we started the workshop with some fun activities to get familiar with the new people you have just met. It was not connected to design thinking at all – as we had to draw some portrait of each other – but it was perfect to get to know each other a bit. After this small intro, we listened to the first half of the Neda’s presentation. We formed groups and started working, because the great part of this workshop was really about to try out everything we were learning simultaneously. Every group got a problem as a task that they had to solve in the best way during this two days.

The first group work was a brainstorming session, called “the charrette”. We had 20 minutes to identify our problem and find the users, stakeholders who have influence and try to connect and group them. After this, to gather some data we had to do some interviews. We had an hour to go out on the streets and talk with people who might relate to the problem that we were trying to solve. These type of interviews always have to be planned in advance, but you always have to change your questions based on the actual situation. We got some guidelines from Neda: always ask open question, ask why, and again why, ask to define words that stand out, look for patterns and find what sticks out. It was interesting, how easy is to start a conversation with strangers in Stockholm, as they were interested in our questions and not afraid to answer our them. Even if they were in hurry a bit they had a few minutes to helps us out.

After a short break the next task was to understand what we saw and heard during the interviews. This is the “define” part of the design thinking process. Until that point we had had to find out more and more, the quantity had been the key word, but then we had to focus on the most important things and identify the problem. Neda was giving some great tools for us again about how to do it.

At the start of the second day we worked on the “ideation” part of the workshop. We used the data we gathered, and patterns we identified to brainstorm and ideate around the interviewees problems we could solve. We were asked to be visual, when trying to explain our ideas to group members. After brainstorming, where we generated a lot of ideas, we voted and identified the ideas that people liked the most. After first round of voting and finding three best ideas, we voted again among them and chose the one that we liked the most and wanted to work on for the rest of the workshop.

Now when we found our favourite ideas we had to proceed to the last part of the workshop, prototyping. The idea of the prototyping part was to bring our ideas to life quickly, making them tangible and get some feedback to improve these ideas further. To be able to create a prototype we had to start with pre-prototyping. This can include things as stories, theatre, role-play, sketches, mock-ups etc. We had to generate a storyboard. On the storyboard we had to break the idea into smaller moments over time. This could easily explain the problem that we want to solve and the “implemented” action and solution. After that we got a time slot to build a prototype. The main idea during the creation of prototype was to “Do – Think – Do”. Important advices was not to try to make a perfect prototype and not “fall in love” with it. After prototyping session, to be able to test the prototypes each group presented their prototype to the rest of the groups and the final voting was done where the winning prototype was selected.
In short, we had a great time in the two evenings and we could try the design thinking out in the workshop. We met with lot of new and kind people, and they have helped us to develop our innovative thinking process. It was a good combination of learning and doing as we had some presentation and we were able to do them immediately after it. We would like to thank to Neda and to the Impact Hub that they gave us the opportunity to attend at their workshop.

STHLM TECH MeetUp Dec 05, 2016

Companies presenting @STHLM TECH MeetUp Dec 5, 2016

Axel Springer SE 

Axel Springer SE is the market leader in the German print business (major competitors are the Bauer Media Group, Bertelsmann, Hubert Burda Media, and Holtzbrinck). The company is active in more than 40 countries through subsidiaries, joint ventures and licenses and is one of the leading digital publishers in Europe, with more than 50% of its revenues coming from digital media activities. The Plug and Play Tech Centre is an international StartUp accelerator founded in 1990 and located in Sunnyvale, California (USA). It has housed companies like Google, Paypal, Logitech and DropBox. Some of its shareholders are news papers such as the German BILD, or Business Insider. Some of the companies below its wings are Weps (AI chatbot website builder on any devices), TechSpaghetti (educational software focused on language apps for children aged 4+), Vertico (network for inspiration, curating products, creating video stories, making them shoppable), Wingly (flight sharing platform, connecting private pilots with passengers), Trill (location based language teaching application),  or Pivii (web based analytics tool for social media in a SaaS subscription model). The accelerator offers mentors, an expert network, EUR 25k in return for 5% of the company, workshops, introduction to investors, co-working spaces and ongoing support. Companies such as Accenture, Deutsche Bank or ERGO Group AG are among the „family-members“, partners and co-investors, besides Airbnb, Dropbox, or the German „BILD“ (among others).

Welcoming the audience and introducing the program

Outlook into 2017

The outlook into 2017 was being held by representatives of Amazon, Swedbank, Absolut Vodka, MediaMarkt, Deutsche Bank AG, Axel Springer, Schibsted Media Group, Telia Company AB and Hyper Island.

Hyper Island

EDCi European Digital City Index 2016

Swedbank AB

Amazon Web Services

Deutsche Bank AG

Absolut Vodka

Telia Company AB

Media Markt

Schibsted

Plug & Play Accelerator

StartUp Pitches

OneMove AB

PriceBeam

StartUp Pitch of PriceBeam

Speakerbox

StartUp Pitch of Speakerbox

The best Things come in Threes

Conclusion

Although the whole event stretched the planned time significantly we are now looking skeptically forward to a very mixed interactive reality in 2017, wirelessly  connected to a smart wall, and chatting with our talking bot in Swahili. We will not waste our time with reading a newspaper. Plug-Out and Pray, so to say. 🙂 Cordial thanks to Prof. Terrence Brown and Serdar Temiz for nudging us.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it, Slush is one of the largest assemblies of investors and entrepreneurs in the world. The event that hosts around 15 000 (and counting) guests annually is hosted in the cold and dark Helsinki, Finland each fall. The two-day event boasts dozens of world class keynote speakers and discussion on multiple stages. The talks usually revolve around the topics of entrepreneurship, business, society and technology. In 2016 Slush brought together 1 700 startup companies, 800 Investors and hundreds of journalists in one massive and international networking event.

Along with thousands of others I decided to apply to Slush 2015 as volunteer and later took part in the event in something called the “demo area team”. In addition to aforementioned stages, Slush has areas for product displays and large companies have bought dedicated areas to promote their development. For startups there was the demo area, where the companies could rent a 2m by 2m booth for their own product displays and promotions. In an event that was just incredible as a whole, this area was in my opinion the best part. Here you could meet some of the most interesting companies both from Finland and internationally. Most importantly you could actually have a conversation with the people working for these companies. There were also specific areas for one-on-one meetings between startups and investors, facilitated by Slush’s matchmaking tool for entrepreneurs, food courts, one of the stages was dedicated to pitching (Each Slush has a pitching competition, where the winner gets contacts, partnerships and most importantly, investments).

As a volunteer I got to see the buildup to this great event, the event itself and a lot of the behind the scenes action such a massive event is sure to provide. And the best thing? If you volunteer, you get into the event for free. It’s hard to describe this event in a blog post, so I strongly recommend applying for volunteer in Slush 2017 and seeing it for yourself. There is something for pretty much everyone and I actually scored a great internship in Slush

– Jaakko Söderholm

Due to the I get from the Open & User Innovation course, I got a lot of passion about finding innovation stuff. Wahen I went back to China during this Christmas, I went to Shenzhen, the most dynamic and innovative city of China. Fortunately, I have a lot of chance to get close to the new innovation environments. SZOIL is one of them.

SZOIL refers to Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, established by SIDA(Shenzhen Industrial Design Association) and Maker Collider, is a space and platform for worldwide makers to communicate and cooperate. SZOIL is also the first Fab Lab in Shenzhen authorized by MIT CBA as a research and development partner of FabLab 2.0. SZOIL embodies four functions including Fab Lab promotion and FabLab 2.0 research and development, innovation and entrepreneur education courses for makers, global maker service platform, and industry chain collaboration service. The lab dedicates in exploring the issues and developing solutions to connect the massive production ecosystem to small hardware startups so as to promote the international standing of Shenzhen in the development of digital intelligent hardware and manufacturing and build a future intelligent hardware Silicon Valley by combining new open source method and current manufacturing system in Shenzhen.

They do four kinds of things. First is Fab Lab establishment and solution, second is innovation and entrepreneur education courses, third is global maker service platform and the last is industrial chain collaboration service.

So what is Fab Lab? Fab Lab, advocated by MIT CBA, is a low-cost laboratory for people to make whatever they want by applying digital and simulation tools in it. In June 2015, SZOIL formally signed an agreement with MIT CBA, which became the first Fab Lab in Shenzhen jointly developed with CBA. In Fab 12 held in August 2016, Fab Foundation and SZOIL jointly displayed FabLab 2.0.

SZOIL provides the makers with standard digital manufacturing environment and innovation courses according to the needs of clients and links with the global Fab Lab network, and it designs the blueprint for the maker space in the aspects of space planning, standard equipment, innovation course, etc.

Open innovation is the future of innovation, building open labs to the world makes a great benefit not only to the creaters but also for all the people who use their product.  It can reduce cost of conducting research and development. At the same time, make potential for improvement in development productivity and incorporation of customers early in the development process. Open innovation also increase in accuracy for market research and customer targeting, has a potential for synergism between internal and external innovations. I believe that both China and Sweden would benefit a lot of their openness to innovations.

In Stockholm, there are also quite amout of open labs.

kth open lab: https://www.kth.se/en/samverkan/arenor/open-lab-1.523140

oepnlab: http://openlabsthlm.se/

The CISMOB Interred Europe conference was held at NOD building Kista and the theme was about Smart Cities and how ICT and openness(Figure 1) could help to improve cities’ transport infrastructure. There were many speakers from various industries and governmental organizations who shared valuable tips on how they are working towards their own smart cities. There was much emphasis on allowing data-sets to be openly available so that developers can leverage on them to create useful applications for the people.

Figure 1 Open Government approach

It was interesting that all the representatives of their own countries said that their own cities were aiming to be the smartest cities in the world. Ann Hellenius, the CIO of Stockholm shared Stockholm’s aim to solve issues related to smart traffic control, parking spaces, lighting, car pooling etc. Another speaker, the Chief Information Officer of IDA Singapore shared similar efforts being done in Singapore. Being a Singaporean, I have seen that having open data has greatly improved the livelihood of the citizens.

One of the speakers, Brendon Clark, Studio Director of Interactive Institute, also highlighted the importance of bottom up approach in creating a smart city. He explained about using various methodologies such as collaborative design, generative prototyping, and exploratory research. All these allows to look at problems from the user’s perspective thereby reducing designer bias.

With hyper fast internet connectivity, the prominent cities in the world are competing to become the world’s smartest cities. Knowledge transfer and collaboration is the key ingredients(along with others mentioned in Figure 2) to achieving this goal. Overall, it doesn’t matter which city becomes the smartest city first, it is about solving humanity’s problems using ICT.

Figure 2 Ingredients for creating a Smart City

More information about the conference can be found here:

http://www.egovlab.eu/cismob/blog/

Figure 1 from https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/ict-enabled-public-sector-innovation-horizon-2020

What is the STC about

Each year, Spotify organizes a tech challenge for students around the world where they can collaborate and hack on new ideas and/or problems that they, or the Spotify technical team faces.

It is not a competition and the focus is more in having fun and trying things rather than trying to win. And of course one aspect of the event is to scout out for new talent in the field who are in the finishing phases of their studies.

This year it was held between 25.-27. November in the Spotify headquarters in Östermalm area of Stockholm, Sweden. The office space is very nice and they actually occupy all but one floor of the building.

Spotify HQ in 61 Birger Jarlsgatan, Stockholm, Sweden

Getting started

Once we got the office we were met with the Spotify Street Team, a group of employees consisting of students themselves, and on the tables there was some snacks and drinks which was nice as it started quite late. The street team act as a link between the company and the university world. They actually organize these events and were with us during the whole weekend. They had already split us into teams of 4 people with a sticker in our visitor pass informing which team you belong to. Mine was a red star, my other teammates were Nadja from Germany, Mert from Turkey and Jakob from Sweden.

My visitor pass

Also present were the SDK (Source Development Kit) and API (Application Protocol Interface) teams, who handle the development of mobile development tools and opening Spotify data to outsiders respectively. They were there to help us in any technical problems we might have in using the tools that they were offering. During the intro, which was held in what I consider to be one of the most awesome private auditoriums(it was sadly forbidden to take pictures inside), they also encouraged us to apply for internships during next summer, and to top it off, there was a power bank on each seat.

The evening was concluded with beers and a nice dinner waiting outside the auditorium. After we finished the dinner, there was a concert upstairs in the social area of the company, where we met other employees of the company and at 10 there was a surprise concert by Thomas Stenström.

Thomas Stenström with his band

Putting the work in

Next morning at 9 we met again for a nice breakfast and started discussing about the ideas we have for the challenge. After the breakfast there was a short presentation by the tech team, where they described some particular problems they would like to solve, as pointers for the teams.

We had discussed on the previous evening about what to do for the weekend and we decided to tackle the problem of how to handle who chooses which songs to play in a house party for example. Our solution was a playlist that can be edited by anyone who knows the name of the playlist and does not require the people who want to edit to own a Spotify account. The music then plays from one device which is connected to the sound system and has Spotify installed.

Pretty much all of saturday went along developing the app, which we decided to build with Meteor.js-framework. Our work was hindered a bit with the fact that Nadja and Mert had not used JavaScript before. Nevertheless, we managed to get the work rolling in such way that they handled back-end development and I did front-end, while Jakob focused on the visual design of the app.

Mert and Jakob working hard

In the afternoon, we had a paper plane competition which was really a lot of fun and a good break from the hard working. Later in the evening they brought some beers and we continued to work and socialize until 23, while some people even managed to squeeze in a game of pinball in there.

Paper plane fun

Results and conclusion

Work started again on Sunday morning at 9, and we had some trouble as we could not get an important feature of the app to work, which was the actual playing of the playlist. However, the API team was really helpful in this and we managed to solve it while finding some bugs in the API along the way which the team really appreciated.

Screenshot of the app

The SDK & API teams

The app was functioning just before the “exhibition” which started at 13 and we were quite happy with the result. The other teams made apps like: a playlist generator from an image, GLIP, a .gif music video generator based on the lyrics of the song and geotagging the songs you are currently listening just to name a few. I really liked the music video generator, it produced some really hilarious results from time to time.

All and all, I had a really great time, the atmosphere during the entire event was super nice: cool people, good food and technology makes a great combination! Although the focus was on the challenge, we ended up talking about so many other subjects over the course of the event and exchanging ideas & thoughts about different cultures. While there was the aspect of recruiting involved, it did not feel forced at any point. Also when considering the gifts and servings, one must also think about the value of the innovation we produced for them during the weekend. To conclude, it was a great, enriching and joyful experience, highly recommended!

Our team!