The coffee is ready and it's still not even 07:00 yet. Let's see if we can get this done before the sun comes up.

Continuing the Ambiguous Middle Phase we had a week full of appointments but with little to show. We visited another five design firms this week–in addition to three last week–in search of the perfect team to give HDL 2010 a distinct visual identity. Across the board I've been impressed with the teams and their work, but I have to say that Helsinki firms seem to be allergic to sharing their projects on the internet. No one can see how great your work is unless you show it, people!

Marco has been busy confirming speakers and participants in our summertime Studios as well as the event in September. Just before the end of the day Friday we had another look at the studio week schedules and those are shaping up nicely. We're about 60% confirmed on the weeklong program for each of three studios, but securing those remaining slots is work that's well underway.

Mmmm. Coffee and a snapshot:

In between visiting design studios, Minna and I dropped by Ritarihuone to check out the venue for our opening dinner in September.

Also on the topic of studios, we had an efficient meeting with the Ministry of Education. As a reward for arriving late (thanks, blizzard) we departed early. They're excited about working with us on the Education Studio and we're very pleased that are so engaged by the collaboration. We gave them a tiny window of opportunity to make comments on the Challenge Briefing draft and they still managed to responded a day early.

Tomorrow Marco and I are meeting to look over the comments we've received from our key stakeholders and to prepare a really, truly, 100% final draft of the Challenge Briefings.

And it goes... Minna has been interviewing catering co's, I've been on the horn with Barcelona about the design work for the Challenge Briefings, Hanna secured a travel agency to arrange everything for our guests (and making sure they're not incompetent robots), and we all continue the hunt for a studio space... This was week 50.

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Posted by Bryan Boyer
February 20th, 2010