This week? It snowed; we had a holiday; it was a great. Hope you had a nice holiday as well, now let’s get back to work!

I should be sleeping, as I’m on the plane flying to the California for the holidays, but instead I’m writing this weeknote because I’m that dedicated nerdy.

Somehow it seems appropriate that this, our last full week before the holiday, is also the first full week of snow in Helsinki. Goodbye, Winter gloom. The snow really does make daily life more bright and the quality of the light is something special.

We started out with a visit to the comfy office of Demos Helsinki in the city’s Viiskulma (“five corners”) neighborhood. Having checked out their Peleton project a bit it was nice to hear more of the backstory (English summary here). They started out by looking at all of the decisions that one makes in their lifetime and the potential impact those choices have on your individual carbon footprint. From there, they selected the decisions that have a high footprint potential and asked “who is the gatekeeper for this decision?” The list is counterintuitive and suggests that the people at point-of-purchase have a very important role to play in behavior change. If your builder suggests that you use a certain insulation, for instance, you generally follow their advice. Peleton is about working with these gatekeepers to help them understand the importance of their role.

Demos was a no brainer when I had a call from SIX in London later in the week to talk about social innovation in Finland. They’ve been commissioned to write up an exciting report on the topic and we were happy to share with them some of the things going on here. We’ll post a link when the report is published.

Actually, lots of phone calls and emails this week – mostly Marco’s – to catch up with old contacts and start sharing with them the plans for 2010. It’s a bit odd to be announcing that here since we haven’t really had a chance to give a suitable public overview of where Helsinki Design Lab is headed, but that’s only because it has been so fluid. In construction the term “fast track” means that the process of designing and building a building are conducted in parallel, with the early site work and foundations going in before the full set of plans are drawn. This is very much the approach we’ve had to HDL. With the foundations just about in we’re also nearing completion on the design, so to speak, and I’m making it my goal to update this site in the first week of January with a clearer plan for 2010. Bear with us.

Some logistical things: we packed up the office so we can move to a new floor in the new year; Marco visited TAIK to talk about having some of their students work with us in the Spring; Martin and I made a final decision on the paper stock for our stationery (Munken Lynx, if you’re curious) and finalized the design; and I had a late night check-in call with XOXCO. Those time zones are killer.

Thursday we met with Pekka T. to talk about possible venues and agreed to go with him on a visit to City Hall in early January. This is an important one for us: we definitely do not want to host HDL in a typical congress hall or something overly formal like Finlandia, beautiful though it may be. HDL 1968 was held on the grassy fields and in the crenelated environs of Suomenlinna. In 2008 we temporarily converted a warehouse space in Katajannokka into an amenable environ for conversation. This year, as we begin to hone the focus of HDL as an environment for enhancing design as a strategic asset for government we hope to host the event literally within the halls of government – to embed design there, if even temporarily for now. We’re also trying to avoid the all-in-one sort of venue that traps participants in a single place, regardless of how comfortable it may be. If things work out, we’ll be hosting HDL across a couple different locations around Senaatintori. This is a big if, but an exciting one.

And I’ve saved the best item for last: we asked Adriel and Ezra to have 80% drafts of their respective challenge briefs done for us this week and they took that quite literally, sending the files at the end of the day Friday! I’ll be pouring over the briefs during the flight, but first I think I’ll sign off and enjoy this sunrise over the Baltic.

We’ve been digging into the case study content. Justin and I have been working on drafting up case studies of the various projects we visited in November. Thankfully there were two of us because it’s very helpful to have two sets of notes so as to provide a complete picture of visits and interviews. Also, this must be journalism 101, but it really does make a big difference to review and transcribe notes as soon as possible after an interview. Next time we do a round of case study visits we will definitely build in more time for processing and documentation.

Minna and I had the great pleasure of visiting Jaakko Ihamuotila and Yrjö Sotamaa in their respective homes to interview them on video about their roles as organizers of the 1968 event, which was HDL’s predecessor. Both of them mentioned the Cop15 proceedings in Copenhagen to illustrate how it has taken us 40 years to come back to a discussion that was quite active in the late 60s and early 70s.

Contemplating an environment for Mentally Handicapped Children at HDL 1968. Photo by Kristian Runeberg.

I was also encouraged to hear both Jaakko and Yrjö mention the important role played by two design exercises held at HDL 1968. Participants were asked to collaborate on the design and prototyping of two items which offered an opportunity for ideas to be applied toward practical needs. I’m hoping that there was not an intended connection between the two projects – a mobile reindeer slaughter facility and an educational environment for mentally handicapped children – but those specific choices are a mystery that we’ll chalk up to the magic decade that was the 1960s.

The more we introduce new people to HDL the more we refine the sequence of documents that progressively explain the project. I’ve organized a folder on the server with versions of our project explanation in two sentence, one page, and five page versions. These are critical to have on hand at a moment’s notice and we continually refine them as the necessary focus shifts and details become more concrete. This week we put these documents to work in meetings with the Ministry of Education, Foreign Ministry, and Aalto University who will all be contributing to HDL 2010 in varying ways. Lots more of these sorts of meetings in the coming month or two.

Confirmed one of the participants in our Sustainability studio. This is an important focus for us leading up to the holiday.

Speaking of which, we took a long lunch on Tuesday for our team Joululounas (“Christmas Lunch”) which reminds me that next week is the last before the holiday. There’s a lot to do before we close out the year but it’s feeling manageable.

Besides, we seem to work better under pressure anyways.

Is it really december already?

This week we learned the true cost of a long trip. It takes at least a week to catch up on everything that you put off because you were on the road. The accumulation of missed emails, the necessity of thank yous and greetings to everyone you met on your travels, the processing of a huge pile of receipts (47 expense reports!) … this adds up to another week that disappears from the calendar.

Adriel and Ezra are in full swing on their challenge brief documents. Looks like we were ever-so-slightly ambitious in our original mid-December timeline, but they’re still going gangbusters and are developing some great material. Like any research or fact-finding process, we’re coming to realize that it will be important to have a resting period where we can collectively let the material soak in before going in for another round of edits and revisions. So we’ll get the briefs to draft by mid december and then pick them up again in the middle of January after we’ve had a chance to get some more eyes on the content.

Off in Barcelona, TwoPoints is nearing completion on the design of the Helsinki Design Lab visual identity system. We’ve sent out some draft material to the printer for a quote on papers and envelopes and all those necessities of business. Meanwhile we’ve started working with the templates internally to format our documents in a coherent manner. Some kinks still, but one last round of revisions is ironing those out nicely. It’s weird to see this thing that has been such a homegrown project start to grow up a little. The first time I printed off our one page description of HDL with the official template was a nice moment in the office. It’s a simple milestone.

Work on the website is underway as well. We signed off on the spec from XOXCO which means they’ll be in wireframes and schemas soon. We owe them a draft of the HDL case study format which I have been woefully behind on completing. Sorry guys!

Even though it’s strange to work on the weekend in Finland, yesterday we were on the phone with Helen, a talented and adventurous designer/filmmaker based in the US. She’ll be off to Bangalore in February to spend a few months with Poonam Bir Kasturi and the Daily Dump team helping them tell the story of their work through a documentary film. It’s a twofold job we’ve asked Helen to do: make a film but also spend a couple months working with the Daily Dump as a team member. Construction and reflection. HDL is a big fan of the work that the Daily Dump is up to and we’re excited to be able to support them.

Speaking of which, this week Marco has been starting a few conversations with people who may be able to help us support more projects in the future. Not much to say about this at the moment, only that it’s something we would like to be able to do.

We dipped into architecture and did a tiny bit of work on our physical space as well. Just as we approved the design for a renovation to our little corner of the Sitra offices we’ve been relocated to another floor. Friday was spent furiously sketching out some new layouts in order to get the furniture order out before the holiday. Priority #1: vast whiteboards.

And one final but important note that I forgot from last week’s update. While I was away Minna and Marco visited Juhani Pallasmaa at his home to interview him on tape. Juhani was one of the initiators of the predecessor event to Helsinki Design Lab (we’re calling it HDL 1968) and his interview is one in a series that we’re doing with the original crew. It’s fascinating material and we’ll post bits of it here once this video project is wrapped up.

Lots of moving parts around here; doing our best to keep them all organized and operational.

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