This week, I’ve seen things that are astonishing, in a small but important way.
I’ve marveled at the adaptability of people — I think every parent agrees that work from home with small kids used to be an are-you-kidding-me scenario, but it happened, and parents teleconferenced their way through it all to make it work. It’s just one example of the ways people are adapting, but an amazing one.
Reminders of just how important it is for us to be in touch, even if from a distance, are everywhere: The belly laughs in meetings, even if they happen via webcam. The increased consideration people have for each other when they are physically out and about — smiles, nods, giving way — all very Finnish ways of being kind to strangers.
Through people, flexibility and consideration for others manifest in companies, as well. Seeing companies quickly go beyond just staying afloat and come up with ways to genuinely serve people in their time of need has been wonderful.
These things — adaptability to rapid changes and sensibility for the needs of individual people — are of course basic tenets of design, too. Seeing people resort to them in a world gone mad is a nice reaffirmation of the approach.
What else happened this week?
Monika has been wondering this week about the role of being bold in product design. What makes the design remarkable? Is it still possible to use UX as a differentiating factor? In other words, going back to fundamentals.
Working from home makes Eero a dull boy at times, but other times everything is going great.
Shakti celebrated the most laidback quarantine birthday ever this week with his family. Also, looking forward to start a new project (updates soon on this one) while supporting some updates to the Nordkapp website.
Sari has been busy with finalising some features as well as starting new concepts.
Liam’s in the early stages of a new project, which means drinking from a firehose and trying to make sense of everything at the same time 🚒
Heikki is wondering, who or what kind of people would be interested to hear and learn about our way of crafting services and products? What could we share and with whom?
This week, Sami’s been deep into new business and new opportunities: For example, what could be the ways of articulating potential post-COVID19 futures and their impact on business and stakeholders? Sami’s been also very inspired by a dive into the deep end of experience strategy and behavioural segmentation. Internal narratives versus external stories, internal versus external perception, and so on. He finds these opportunities for deep thinking quite exciting and exhilarating.
Topias has a bit fewer telco meetings at the customer currently and has been able to concentrate on design work more which is nice.
Five things we read this week:
- 10 Learnings from 10 Years × Supercell from Supercell— Ilkka Paananen reflects on the first 10 years of the company — congrats on the anniversary!
- A Pandemic That Cleared Skies and Halted Cities Isn’t Slowing Global Warming from Bloomberg — The macro level of Covid-19’s climate effects. Unfortunately, not all good news.
- How Basecamp Built a $100 Billion Business by Doing Less on Purpose from Medium— A take on a company that chose to steer clear of the exit-driven strategies of many of its peers.
- Is remote working the future of development? — An interesting perspective on a timely question; trust and re-evaluating our daily habits can make remote a more permanent state of things.
- Coronavirus could spell the end for fashion’s toxic hype obsession from i-D — how Covid might bring about a much-needed change in the industry.
Weeknotes are what happened at our studio this week. This week’s weeknote was curated by Joska Pyykkö.
Joska is a strategist at Nordkapp, currently loving the positive energy of positive colleagues.
