IxDA Finland

IxDA Helsinki Book Club is going to meet again in January. Now it’s time to decide what book we will be reading & discussing. So check out the candidates below, and give your vote on the bottom of the page. The vote is open until December 5th 9th, and we’ll keep you posted on the results of the poll and the date for the Book Club meet soon after that.

The candidates

• Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? by Susan M. Weinschenk
  
  
  
• Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics by John Rhodes
  
  
  
• Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Don Norman
  
  
  
• Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko
  
  
  

Give your vote!

Hello all,

thanks for stopping by at Nordkapp for Helsinki Design Week Open Studios and IxDA Helsinki fall kickoff. Here’s Teppo’s presentation from IxDA

Panu’s notes and the rest of the content is available at Nordkapp blog;

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We are looking for sponsors and presentors for fall activties as well. If you have a project or process you want to share, or want to host an IxDA evening in your company, let us know! Contact address is sami.niemela at gmail.

IxDA Helsinki meetups will kick off again in early September, co-inciding with the Helsinki Design Week. The date is Thursday 10.9. and the place is Nordkapp offices at Kalevankatu 3 A 40 from 6pm.

For the program, we’ve got  little special figured out for you; First off, the Hki Design Week Open Studios is happening at the same time, and the doors are open from 6-9PM for DW participants. As for presentations, we’ve got at least two things:

1 — a fresh recap of dConstruct 2009 conference, straight from Brighton, and

2 — Panu Korhonen Retrospective. Panu is a senior Nokia design manager with an impressive 15 year history within user experience, and he’s going to reflect that towards some interesting findings on interaction design leadership.

The space may be limited, so please sign up at our Facebook Event. Welcome!

Our next meetup is now scheduled: mark Thursday June 11th 18:00h to your calendars!

As this is our final get-together before the summer break, we thought that it would be nice to enjoy fresh air, evening sun and green grass for a change, so instead of our usual hang-out Nolla we’re heading to a picnic at Koffin puisto (Sinebrychoff park).

Let’s meet up at 18:00 outside the entrance to Bar Fanny. If you come later, just find our merry group somewhere on the grassy hills. Address to Bar Fanny (formerly known as Fanny Goes to Hollywood) is Bulevardi 40, easily reachable e.g. via tram 6 from center.

Do bring your own blankets/seats, food, drinks, frisbees, boomboxes, …. And come early, as our agenda contains not only picnic & park life but also our first book club gathering. Check the details on the book club on our previous blog post.

In case of really bad weather, we’ll go to Bar Fanny instead (which is conveniently just by the park).

After June 11th, the next meeting will be organized after everybody has returned from summer holidays, most probably in late August. Remember to subscribe to our blog’s RSS feed to keep yourself updated on things after & during summer, and also join our Facebook group!

Grass photo by RyanBSchultz

We are proud to announce another addition to our meetup agendas: the IxDA Helsinki Book Club!

In the spirit of the UX Book Club, our very own Book Club meets every two months discussing a book closely (or loosely) related to interaction design. Everybody is welcome to join in – you don’t need to read the book to get something out of the meetup.

There will be an introduction to the book and the subject matter by a designated main panelist, and other people who have read the book will join in on the panel discussion. The discussions are as laid-back as all IxDA happenings, so anybody is free to throw in their five cents – even if you haven’t read the book. Throw in your ideas about the subject, ask the panelist tricky questions…

If you do read the book, try to select two issues from the book that struck a cord with you and one issue that you didn’t get or disagreed with.

At the end of the discussion, candidates for the next book will be presented and voted upon and the winning book will then be the center of attention in the next book club meeting.

Schedule – 11th June and onwards

The idea is to organize the book club gatherings bi-monthly in the future, which means every other IxDA Hel meetup will revolve around a certain book & theme. 2 months should give everybody enough time to get the book & read it. The first round will however be a bit faster:

The first book club meeting will be on the next IxDA Hel meetup, 11th June – more info on that on a separate blog post. We’ll continue with book club & IxDA meetups after summer break in August in more regular schedule.

And the first book of the club is…

…with a landslide win on the voting organized in the April IxDA meetup:

Bill Buxton:
“Sketching User Experiences:
Getting the Design Right and the Right Design”

Read more about the book at Amazon.com.

The most inexpensive option for purchasing the book we could find is Book Depository (fast shipments to Finland, no additional postage fees).

Join the club on June 11th!

So: go get the book or borrow it from your colleague, read it through and bring your thoughts with you to the next IxDA meeting and you’re all set!

And do come in and join the discussion on June 11th even if you haven’t read the book!

“Book Club” photo by infowidget

Interesting events are happening around the globe but it’s hard to attend most of them. To keep us on the edge, IxDA Helsinki calls in the collective power of our members to bring in the latest news and share it with others.

Been to a conference? Listened to an interesting talk? Give us a quick recap of it. Reduce what you heard into one evening (or less) and bring others onboard. Want go get only the juicy bits of a conference? Come on and come listen to a recap of it.

We start with a conference recap from MX09, presented by Henrik Rydberg from Aisti. He will reduce the three day experience management conference held in March into one evening, sharing the latest news from companies like Adaptive Path, Google/YouTube, Forrester and Zappos (.com). Ideas and conversation is deemed to spring up. You might also want to take some notes.

Join us at our familiar place bar Nolla at April 23, 18:00. Welcome!

Unfortunately the february slipped by due excessive workload on all organizing parties. But feel no fear, here’s the next two meetups for March and April. The place for March meetup is Nolla.

›› Facebook event for March 19th
›› Facebook event for April 23rd

Welcome!

As always, if anyone of group members or someone you know would have something to present, do let us know! We are looking for content on all fields somewhat related to IxD – be it HCI, product design, services or design for marketing comms… please share your views!

We have set up a LinkedIn group for IxDA Helsinki. Everyone interested is welcome to join. Find the group here!

The second ever IxDA Helsinki meetup was held on Jan 29th at Nolla. With 30 people in the audience, Janne Korhonen from Seos, a company focused on sustainable innovation, gave a demystifying presentation on sustainable design:

In the presentation, Janne posed a big question:

What do interaction design and sustainability have to do with each other?

For an answer, click on the image above to find an expanded version the handy checklist for sustainable interaction and service design, found in the final slide of the presentation.

As organizers, we would like to hear from you! Give us your feedback on the events and share your thoughts and ideas in the blog comments or via e-mail: helsinki.ixda@gmail.com

Resources on sustainable design for designers:

An A-B-C-D Approach to Making Better Products
A sustainable design model developed by IDEO and BSR with instructions on how to introduce sustainable design in organizations.

Eco-indicator 99 – Manual for Designers
An easily approachable, guide to Life Cycle Impact Assessment.

Sustainable Services – An Innovation Workbook
A sustainable design manual which has proven especially useful for Seos.

(Comments are closed for this one due immense amount of spam diverting from Slideshare)

The second IxDA Helsinki meetup will be held at the familiar Ravintola Nolla. This time we’ll hook up in the other end of the restaurant for some more space and projection capabilities.

Janne Korhonen from Seos will present a point of view on sustainable design and it’s value. The overall feel of the evening will still be loose, informal & relaxed. Check out the participants at Facebook: http://is.gd/gqQ9

Last time we had more than 35 people stopping by, looking forward to top that this time. Welcome!!