21.04 | Searching for Inspiration

Autor: Sviiter

We're proud to present our Designer & Partner Erkki's presentation in conference E-Learning - Serious Game speaking up in Searching for Inspiration section.

So, Who am I, how my background looks alike and what affected me the most? 

I’ve been in design field around six years, that’s not much, but I can say, I have some views already. I have been working as Design policy maker and workin permanently as a designer also.

My work in Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, in Economics Department in Technology and Innovation Section gathered fields supporting Innovation policy stradegy in Estonia, rising Innovation awarness, maping creative and other importand fields for my supporting and research work. Also, I participated in European Design and Innovation policy creation work group called SEE Design.

At the moment I work in E-Learning Center in Tallinn University, dealing with supportive issues in Arts, Design and Health subjects containing e-Learning.

Creation & Design - How it affects us? How we understand design? Does we know the role of design in society, extra value, usability and as a process?

What is design? What we thing when we say it, is it just some sentence describing some drawing or is it something else? Most of us, Design means just some pretty toy, in architecture we say is the building beautiful or not, Design is just some package, printing or else, is that all?

In my opinion we can separate design into four different sides:

Design as Innovation - The situation, when Designer is added into company strategy development, Design is the part of every step. From Goverment side, Design is looked as the part of Innovation policy. That kind a situation is in Estonia also, Innovation is one of the main priorities when sametime Creative field need still proper maping. In 2009, there were many researches done again and cooperating with Estonian Association of Designers, Estonian Design Center, Ministy of Culture, Ministry of Ecconomic Affairs and Communications the new “Umbrella” document writing has started.

Design as process - Stategical users, Design is’n the result, Design is the form of work, what is used with cooperation with all parts of the development.

Design as art - For stylist, Design is used only for product/service final end Design Development. This section can involve Designer but it’s not the main goal any more. For good example I can point out the situation with Estonian milk-based products. Competition between producers lowered the prices for customers and also good, practical packaging can be found.

Without Design - Design is minimal, almost zero effect for development and usually done by some persons from other field (Marketing, personell, ceo etc). Many of that kind of companies work in heavy machinery or some similar field, where design issues is hard to notice (For example BLRT - Balti Laeva ja Remondi Tehas). But, there is some other companies who are lazy, they are just lazy and we have a lot of those companies.

Besides those four, I can point out one extra, Universal Design or User Friendly what ever you like more. This way is to  consider all special needs in society might come up, there is handicap solutions, User Friendly web pages and user interfaces etc.

What motivates us, what is pushing us, what makes human to self educate?

At the beginning of April I read a blog post in Cutter Consortium written by Jim Highsmith with headline Don’t Motivate, Inspire!, where Jim wrote about better motivation techniques. He split motivation to two parts - External  & Internar.

External Stimulus, like money, extra vacation, extra salary etc affects workers superfically. External Stimulus is not for long term oriented. There is a thin line, where every extra bonus offers you less and less satisfaction.

Internal Stimulus - it is hard to look Internal Stimulus at base worker, but companies should support it. The main target is the team responsible for company growth and developmnet. 

You can stimule your worker with knowledge, that he/she is important to this company, you can spare your company stocks, but nor for the value of the money, it for feeling to be needed and being the part of it.

Internal Stimulus needs less control, when your team work as like followers of the God you can feel like one. So, find your way to motivate the new way - Inspire!

Human needs people around him/her, that need is for trust, that sence gives the courage and opens sences. Trust makes me feel safe, daring to speak up, let it all out. Even some old saying goes: New always grows where the empty place is.

At workplace, showing trust to your team mates can affect you back like you can’t even imagine. Don’t forget to coperate, this is the point of the team, trust each other - speak up.

Now, I will tell you interesting story. Ants Paju, former athlete and public leader, who made an amazing speech in TEDx Tallinn. 

Ants talked about cooperating, he took his example to medicine field, because he was in very bad situation some time ago. He told an interesting story, starring Patient, Doctor and Trouble. Estonian medicine is a bit out of shape at the moment, cooperation isn’t working, why? Because Patient and Doctor can’t stand together aginst to Trouble. Why it isn’t working? It is because, there is a lack of trust and new medicine provides less contact between Doctor and Patient. There must be cooperation in life and death situations. Would you agree?

Definitely, creation is framed by base of knowledges. Creation is unexpected if we leave out the developing process. There is a lot of researches that confirm the creation and business people usually don’t understand each other. This lack of communication tells us, that developing process is weak. At the end, we find ourselves in situation where desgner is involved into developing process too early, too late or even left out - it is very common.

Good examples from Estonia

Salon+ hair saloons - They are not barber shops, they are saloon, including their services class of sparkling vine, SMS services in booking for clients and after business time head massages.

Villa Benita - Offers home for elder people, it's not just place to stay and wait for passing out, it's a home.

Skype - Estonian startup, what is now known global, they have strong platform, great UI and brilliant idea. 

Simplicity sells - My own example entering into new market. The example, how our team went to Milan, to European biggest Horeca fair. How to start and how to manage clients, when their first interest is to sell their products with the time they have been billed. The result was postcard format business card with chinese words on it. You can find the example on my Creattica profile.

Service Design, what, why?

In Estonia, there isn’t any minerals, metals, no big rivers for hydro power, no big heavy machinery and big scale production. Despite of that we are quite proper export country in service export. We are very successful, as we are so little. But, we can be and do better.

Service Design as a sentence has peen pointed out in last of couple years, even in government side. Service Design, sometimes called also Service Innovation is way or a process of creating some extra values to somebody's service. The system is almost the same as in product design, It just includes different issues what are more common to services.

The Conference site: http://conference2010.e-uni.ee/index.php?n=en&do=24