A week spent looking inwards and outwards. Lots of work with Sitra colleagues last week - across public affairs and communications; talking to the business development team; moving forward with our workplace renovations and working styles etc. And then plenty of work around Brickstarter and food projects.

Team round-up; we have two people Stateside at the moment; as well as Justin in Boston, we have Bryan in NYC and California. He's talking to all kinds of people around Brickstarter-like projects and HDL2012. Judging by a quick Skype earlier today, he's getting into good discussions; for example, his interview with the folks behind +pool, the technology behind a proposed floating swimming pool in the Hudson, funded via Kickstarter.

+pool vision. Source: pluspool.org

Marco and the rest of us are now devoting a significant amount ot time to planning HDL2012. More on this when we can, obviously.

Bryan, Kali (aka our colleague Karoliina Auvinen) and I are off to Berlin in a couple of weeks, on Brickstarter research. We're going to chat with Dieter Genske, who I had talk at Arup Melbourne last year, as we're particularly interested in small-scale community-owned energy infrastructure. But we'd also be interested in suggestions as to who else we should talk to while we're there (the background to Brickstarter is here and here; any relevant projects or people we should see in Berlin? Let us know via the comment box below, or tweet via @hdl2010)

Any mention of Berlin necessitates a still from Wings of Desire

Also, a new arrival! Our newest intern Kalle Freese started last week. Kalle's a student at the University of Helsinki, and also one of the best baristas in the Nordic Region, contributing to several of the best local food culture (and of course coffee culture) blogs, as well as working the local Helsinki scene. 

Kalle Freese. Source: nordiccoffeeculture.com

We'll get him to introduce himself here shortly, but you could read his bio at Nordic Coffee Culture in the meantime. While you're there, have a read of Kalle's write-up of his experience in the Finnish barista championships. What's good is the wider sense of how to talk about 'qualities', as well as the broader ideas of practice, service, environment, experience design, and so on.

Kalle will be working us on all projects, but primarily on the food work going on at Tukkutori, in Kalasatama. As with many, he understands and enjoys coffee because of an Antipodean experience, in his case New Zealand. It's a place that, I and many others would argue, possesses the world's best coffee culture (and this is nothing to do with my ongoing search for a good #helsinkiflatwhite, which those who follow my twitter account have to endure.)

I caught up with our Design Exchange placement #1, Sara Ikävalko, on Friday morning. She's got some great video footage of sketching sessions with high school students and others, which we'll get online shortly, and has been running workshops with seniors too; she is busy busy busy.

We rounded off the week in fine style with a great visit from Rodrigo Araya of Tironi Asociadios, in Chile. We were talking to Rodrigo for Brickstarter, and I've typed up the notes from the meeting over at the Brickstarter project blog. Rodrigo came highly recommended by my Arup colleague Alejandro Gutierrez.

Debate in Constitución.

Accompanied by my colleagues Karo Luoto, Kali Auvinen and Johanna Kirkinen, we spent a few hours picking Rodrigo's brains. Suffice to say, the projects in Constitución and Calama that Tironi are working on (with Alejandro Aravena as well as Gutierrez) are thoroughly inspiring, and exemplary models for citizen participation. Read more at Brickstarter; in terms of decision-making cultures, it's an invaluable case study.

Rodrigo, Johanna, Kali.

Finally, it feels like Helsinki World Design Capital is beginning to really emerge now, just as the city emerges from winter. The snow has melted, the sun is shining, there's a Demos-fuelled pavilion latent with potential being built around the corner, and there are a slew of events, publications, projects, and happenings occurring now, which we hope will continue into the summer and beyond. One such publciation incldues 'Helsinki: Beyond Dreams' which Bryan contributed a piece to (you can read it here.)

Illustraton from Helsinki Beyond Dreams by Pent Talvet.

"A generation from now, will Helsinki and Tallinn be connected as a twin city filled with local urbane industries: small factories, craft workshops, courtyard cafes and scientific research labs flourishing side by side in the city centre?"

It's a lovely, lyrical piece building on our shared interest in small-scale manufacturing returning to city streets (and in doing so, finally making use of Helsinki's woefully-underused near-perfect courtyards). Incidentally, The Economist newspaper wrote in a very different mode about the same possibilities just this week, in their special report on 'A third industrial revolution'. 

Illustration from The Economist's special report on manufacturing.

Finally, this week's how-to. In fact, a few of them. (As people that grew up with 'View source', we love a good how-to.)

The first, from pioneering coding community Rails Girls, is really nice example of a "how-to" for a good event. Top notch legibility.

Secondly, "Start-up tips from the food truck revolution" is more of an intervew than a how-to, formally, but you get to the same place.

Thirdly, the excellent new Neighborland has some great pointers for how to use their service to get things done in your (US-based) community. They seem so straightforward and common-sensical at first glance, but that's because the folks behind Neighborland are smart.

Finally, and probably-not-that-transferably, have a flick through the 'handbook for new employees' from games company Valve [PDF]. In a world of The Starfish and the Spider, these guys are clearly no fans of arachnids.

Org charts by Valve employees. Source: Valvesoftware.com

Adam Curtis teaches us to be wary of claims of self-organising communities — quite rightly in my view — but it's often instructive to observe the artefacts of those that try. You might compare and contrast with Forbes earlier this week; turns out there is an 'I' in team after all.

0 comments

Posted by Dan Hill
April 19th, 2012