The Ambiguous Middle Phase of the project – where we work all day, every day and seemingly have little to show for it – is still going strong. This was another week of familiar logistics and confirmations with a few highlights:
Leif Sonkin and Kimmo Rönkä, two of the authors of a Sitra report entitled Seniori 2000 looking at ageing society, dropped by for a meeting. They are enthusiastically revisiting the material and will be checking in with the municipalities involved to see what has come of their visions for the year 2000, now that we're ten years on. This will feed into our ageing studio.
The Challenge Briefings (one for each of our three studios) are 100% complete and press ready. Those files will be waiting in the press' inbox Monday morning. We're treating these as versioned documents so this will be version 1.0. That version number should tick up after the studio as our thinking develops, and hopefully many times after as well.
Finalizing the covers.
Marco was on the phone with Palo Alto and New York, as well as a few places around Europe. Interesting things developing for both HDL and Low2No but my lips are sealed for the moment.
We ended the week with an all-hands away day meeting to review the full compliment of plans for HDL studios and HDL Global. With the first studio beginning in just over a month, things are starting to feel more discrete. Sure, there's still a lot to do, but the work is less and less abstract. The to-do list is growing longer but the individual items are easier to check off, which is probably indicative of some equilibrium of work Law Of The Universe.
Finally, we would like to welcome Annikki to the team! She is going to be helping us with the HDL Studios by coordinating the teams of student research assistants who will be supporting each studio. In the coming weeks we'll post more about what a studio looks like and Annikki will have a better chance to introduce herself then.
Looking to the week ahead – um, tomorrow – we have a bit of a sprint before Easter holidays shut down Finland for a long weekend. Back to it!
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