My absolute favorite part of being a designer is when I get together with others and collaborate. The heat of that moment, the eagerness of participants, the sweat and grind, and the sharing! Throughout my professional career, I hosted various workshops and held several lectures. Here, you can find a selection of them.

Analog design for non-designers | Lowell Executive workshop

In 2018, my team and I successfully hijacked one of our yearly executive meetings at Lowell Nordics for one mission alone. That was improving the design maturity of Lowell. And we all agreed that there is no better way to introduce anyone to something unfamiliar than through a game. So we sat down and turned our most popular digital product -My Lowell- into a cardboard puzzle. The goal was to let our executives design their own My Lowell pages by putting the puzzle pieces together on an empty canvas. We thought supporting that with additional components would be just enough. So we created all the necessary materials with their blank canvases. Well, at least we thought we did. Soon after the start, we realized how mistaken we were in overseeing the fact that non-designers are not non-creatives. The results were mind-blowing. Their approach to knowing no limits and creating visual assets they couldn’t find -because we did not provide- on the fly was purely ingenious. At the end of our time, everyone could recognize the joy of design and how collaboration plays a principal role in it. Not to mention, we ended up having a bundle of great ideas to implement on our product.

Designing services for involuntary customers (while keeping the voluntary clients happy) | Service Design Network Turku

In late 2019, the beautiful people of the Service Design Turku network joined me at our Lowell Turku office for an after-work event. During the two hours we spent together, we discussed the unique challenges of Lowell’s services from the service design perspective. As the name tells the story, Lowell’s business is somewhat like public services but with a twist. Lowell sets an intricate ecosystem by gathering the voluntary and involuntary stakeholders at the same ground for generating value. This proposition alone intrigued the members of SDN Turku and let us spend hours of fruitful discussions.

Figma 101 | UX Design course, University of Turku 

Starting in 2020, I have been organizing online sessions to introduce the basics of Figma. After running a couple of them at Lowell, Seppo Helle from the Univesity of Turku reached out to me to be one of their guest lecturers. Our first session with them happened in late 2021. Despite the COVID limitations, we had a great online collaboration, and the course’s success led these sessions to become regular.