This week felt a bit like a curling match: hastily tidying up a clean trajectory in advance of a moving object.
It involved some conversations with the in-house technology people who are now working on ICT for September, some preparations to bring on six Aalto University interns, confirming more guests for September, steadily taking care of logistics for the summer studios, and ongoing work on the Briefing documents.
Those Briefings are more work than we had expected, so they're eating into other projects (like the website). But it's worth it because the Challenge Briefings are the basis for the summer studios – they have to be great. We're supposed to send them to press in the upcoming week. That's a little scary.
Work on the case studies continued with calls to Leeds and London about knee caps and social housing, respectively.
Kari stopped by to fill us in on the plans for Helsinki Design Week. It's nice to have visitors, but I always feel a little guilty making them come down to Ruoholahti.
Which is why the big news of the week is that we finally confirmed the location of our summer studio space. It's a great spot right in the middle of Helsinki. I'm looking forward to seeing what Seungho whips up when he gets a chance to kit out the raw space as a hospitable studio environment for twelve people. We're going to look into having some open visitors' hours so that you can drop by and check out HDL too. Details on this when they develop.
We're definitely still in Ambiguous Middle Phase, but getting the hang of it now. If the next couple weeks go well, we should leave AMP behind and move to something that feels less like preparing and more like executing.
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