The past two days for me have been incredible!…I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to present my final project from CIID to DesignIt, in Copenhagen and in Arhus at one of their internal “Get Inspired Sessions” It was a priviledge for me to present to them, to gain their feedback on my idea and process and generally to talk to all the lovely people that work there!

I first came across DesignIt about 5 months ago while studying at CIID. They are a strategic design consultancy that has a studio in Copenhagen, Arhus as well as other parts of Europe and Asia. When I came across the company I was super excited and inspired by the diversity of work they cover, the industries they work in and their approaches and methodologies towards the projects they work on. So as you can imagine my eyes lit up when I found out that Mikal Hallstrup, the Chief Visionary Ofiicer and Co-Founder of the company was going to be one of our external examiers for our final project exam at CIID! Meeting Mikal and the rest of the team was a great opportunity to learn more about what the company does and see how elements of our thinking and practice at CIID overlap with the processes they use at DesignIt.

So thank you guys for this super opportunity, it is greatly appreciated!

……they also have a great blog and monthly news post called thinkaboutit, which I highly recommend you subscribe to!

Around 3 months ago at CIID half the class were lucky enough to take part in an 2 week industry project for Novonordisk (the other half worked with Nokia) In pairs we worked on different design challenges defined by Novo, and rapidly generated and developed socially relevant concepts in an area they are currently persuing. At the end of two weeks myself and Erlend presented a solution that was communicated through a high resolution video scenario. Unfortunately I cannot disclose anymore information as the project was done under an NDA….but I am super happy to say that out of the four groups that presented to Novo, our project was one of two that they have decided to keep hold of and develop in the future!

The interaction Design Pilot Year aimed to be a fast paced, collaborative, experimental and energetic year, and the last three months have been no exception to this! Since June, the pilot year students have been working on their final year projects, a chance for them to go solo, put all they have learnt into practice and further develop who they are as individual designers.

This all came to a climax on the 24th, 25th and 26th of August when they presented their final projects to a board of external examiners including Bill Moggridge (IDEO) Gillian Crampton Smith (IUAV) and Mikal Hallstrup (Designit) Over the three days each student took it in turn to step up onto the podium and present their project process, from initial explorations, to iterative prototypes to the final designs. The diversity in project themes ranged from sustainable service solutions to products that have personalities to new cameras for children. It was amazing to see the individual styles of each student really shining through, each project was unique in their very own way, and showed a different approach towards interaction design.

After presenting their projects the students received comments and critique from the examiners. The feedback proved to be very thoughtful and constructive, and provoked interesting discussions on how the projects could be developed further. All in all an amazing experience for the students to present to such down to earth yet highly experienced design professionals.

When all the exams were finished on the final day, there was just enough time for a quick change of clothes before the graduation ceremony! The ceremony began with a round of inspirational speeches from Professor John Heskett, our external examiners and Simona Maschi (Head of Program) The students then took to the stage once again and were presented with their certificates and a crown of leaves, in fitting with our “From Adam to Yves” exhibition! It was a very symbolic moment!

After multiply rounds of (emotional, yet happy) photographs, and trying to re-create the group photo we took on the first day of the pilot year, we sat down to a hygge dinner to celebrated the brilliant success of the year and toasted to the future of the Interaction Design program.

Check out the video!

A few months ago I came across a project done by Roberta Tassi during her graduation thesis at Politecnico di Milano The project is called Service Design Tools and is a website that has collected all the relevant tools for service design processes and and put them in once place. Service Design Tools not only provides all the tools but she gives real examples for each one from a variety of projects. It is an amazing resource and the website has been designed beautifully, not only visually but the functionality and UI of it. It was also great to see that she had used some of the projects I had worked on CIID as examples, including happy mail (GUI design for the elderly) and Travel Global | Read Local (Service design for the Danish libraries) Its a great resourse to bookmark!