That restfulness I wrote about last week? Yeah, that's gone. Week 083 started with an adventure. We climbed to the tip top of our building to get a good view of Jätkäsaari to take some photographs for Low2No.

The "17th floor" (we only have 16 floors in our building)

Marcus Foth from the Queensland University of Technology was in town for a conference and dropped by to chat about urban informatics. They're working on some interesting applications of ubicomp relating to sustainability issues such as food and energy.

Marco is in Belfast sharing Sitra's work with a university there and savoring the last days of his holiday. Meanwhile, Justin is holding down the fort in our Boston office and I hopped over to Copenhagen for a day to catch up with INDEX and MindLab.

Liza (HDL Global 2010) and Niels at INDEX were gracious enough to host me for a morning of case study research. We're looking for another round of case study candidates. If you have any suggestions, please drop us a line! Through years of offering the design award, as well as student design challenges, INDEX has a wealth of knowledge about design projects around the world.

I also stopped by COBE, an architecture office that increasingly finds themselves working at the intersection of traditional architecture and strategy. Their Taastrup Theatre renovation/expansion project is nice example. Asked to renovate a concrete box of a theatre, the team engaged the local public through co-creation workshops to develop a shared vision. This led to an expanded brief and a new budget that enabled a stunning piece of architecture.

Next up was Mind Lab, where Christian (HDL Global 2010) shared his wealth of knowledge working as a design-oriented organization embedded within government. Spanning three ministries, Mind Lab is a really unique organization that combines anthropology, policy, and design knowledge to improve government services. Christian's new book Leading Public Sector Innovation: Co-Creating for a Better Society might be of interest to readers of this site. One of the simple pleasures of life is a meeting with no agenda, and that's what Christian and I had: a free-ranging discussion that covering many topics. As we think about the future of HDL and the role of design at Sitra, these kind of chats are very important.

A walk through Copenhagen's Rosenborg castle gardens

It has been a great week for reflection. This morning we had a visit from Geoff Mulgan of the Young Foundation whose SIX Spring School we enjoyed exactly 20 weeks ago. Like Mind Lab, The Young Foundation are among some of the most interesting do-ers we know so it was a great coincidence that Geoff was in town and had time to stop by. He and his team are doing some work to clarify the various roles, skills, and tools in design projects. When this is published I will make sure to link to it here. Good stuff.

And in other news, it snowed in Helsinki last night.

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Posted by Bryan Boyer
October 15th, 2010