Services will be closed 19.7. –  1.8.2010, but you can access the building with your own key cards.

Happy summer holidays everyone!

A beautiful J. Becker grand piano arrived at Design Factory on 5th July, 2010. The old instrument was donated to Aalto Design Factory by University of Helsinki’s Eteläsuomalainen osakunta. Design Factory will be the piano’s new home until its retirement. The instrument has seen a lot of life and needs gentle love and taking care of.

The piano is currently located at Venture Garage, in the red-bricked hall behind Design Factory’s main buiding. You are welcome to try it out yourself!

For more information, contact

• Annaleena Kuronen

1.7.2010

This is a monthly update by Design Factory research team (DFRT), that is Tua, Senni, Maria, Anu, Meri-Maaria and Miko.

WHAT’S UP?

• ADF met with Tekes representatives to discuss the role of Design Factory in preparation of the forthcoming “Learning Environment” programme. For that meeting, the National Innovation Strategy and how Design Factory is implementing the strategic goals stated in it were analyzed.

• DFRT manuscripts have been accepted for publication: “Kiireeseen ja tehokkuuteen liittyvien piiloasenteiden vaikutus suomalaisessa innovaatiotyössä” in Työelämän tutkimus –journal and “The impact of leadership, management and power in an international knowledge-intensive organization” in Cadernos EPABE.

• Maria has started to write an article on university teachers’ pedagogical training and its impact at the Aalto University School of Science and Technology. She continues working with Opekumppani next fall.

• Anu attended  “Työnohjauksen monimuotoisuus” conference in Turku University 10.6.­–11.6.2010.

• Miko visited the beta launch of the d.thinking Paris program in École des Ponts ParisTech. Miko and Matti from PDR/ADF had a meeting with Sushi Suzuki of d.thinking to discuss the program.

• Tua is trying to catch up on reading and writing on proactivity, entrepreneurial behavior, and a couple of case studies. She is also plunging into the literature on automatic behavior (by e.g. Tanya Chartrand).

• DFRT is taking a summer break starting from this week.

Until next month,

DFRT

18.06.2010

On Thursday June 17th, a nationally significant discussion session was held at Design Factory. The event focused on how innovative research and activities can create new possibilities for the Finnish economy, for example in the forest cluster. The “Suomelle Voimia” discussion session was called together by the Finnish Minister of Defence, Jyri Häkämies.

The key speakers of the event were professor Kalevi Ekman, CEO of Powerkiss Maija Itkonen and director of International Design Business Management program Markku Salimäki.

After the event, a roundtable discussion was initialized by Aalto University’s president of the board Matti Alahuhta, president of Aalto University Tuula Teeri and Petri Vanhala, a representative of the Finnish Paper Workers’ Union. Taking part in the discussion lead by the Minister were also Riku Aalto from Metalworkers’ Union, Ainomaija Haarla from Technology Academy Finland and Kristo Ovaska, the founding member of Aalto Entrepreneurship Society.

A video recording of the event is available at
http://ecmedia.hut.fi/pr/suomellevoimia2010/

These few examples only show the beginning of what can be done together. Aalto-Tongji Design Factory is constantly looking for people, universities and companies interested in interdisciplinary cooperation. And furthermore, no idea is too far-flung for ATDF.  This is the perfect environment to try out ideas that cannot be tested anywhere else.

For more information, please contact

• Viljami Lyytikäinen, viljami.lyytikainen(at)tkk.fi
  +358 44 5724467
  +86 1502 1888 672

On Thursday June 24th,  20 best teams will pitch:  the program is as follows

10:00-11:30 First round of pitch
11:30- 13:00 Break for Lunch and Networking session
13:00- 14:30 Second round of pitch
14:30 15:00 Evaluation-Judge retreat and make their decision
15:00 We will announce the teams that will be working in the Summer of Startups

• For more info, see http://aaltoes.com/2010/06/pitching-competition-for-summer-of-startup/

Press release 17.6.2010

Aalto Venture Garage is the hub where entrepreneurs throughout the Baltic Rim get support and work together to grow their businesses. The Garage started as a grassroots initiative by a group of students and entrepreneurs at Aalto University who saw the need for change in the entrepreneurship ecosystem in Finland.

Aalto Venture Garage runs a growth entrepreneurship program, Bootcamp, four times a year. During Bootcamp, the most potential startups build up their product and test their ideas with the most experienced entrepreneurs and investors who coach and challenge them. The winners receive 5000€ in seed funding, exclusive coaching and workspace in the Garage as they become Garage Startups.

“We offer entrepreneurs a place to work on their business. The Garage hosts 10 startups and regularly welcomes speakers like Mårten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL, to meet the students and entrepreneurs”, explains Kristo Ovaska, the founder of Aalto Venture Garage, “We are in collaboration with Stanford University and partnering with the top players in Israel”.

“It’s about sharing”

Openness and collaboration are central themes in the Garage: “Teams at Bootcamp are co-operating; they are working on each other’s ideas and challenging them. It’s not only a competition but more about sharing and team building” says Juha Ruohonen, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Aalto Venture Garage.

AudioDraft, a Garage Startup and a graduate of the first Bootcamp, has incorporated the open source model in a unique way. The company, recently featured in New York Times, is a web community for managing collaborative audio projects.“The Garage has been an excellent place to work, it provides a great opportunity to push ideas further with the help of enthusiastic entrepreneurs and coaches.” says Teemu Yli-Hollo, the rapper CEO of AudioDraft.

What next?

The next Bootcamp will take place during the last two weeks of September. It is expected that more than 200 teams from all around the world will apply to the next Bootcamp, of which ten teams will be selected. Deadline for all applications is September 8, 2010.

For more information:

• Aalto Venture Garage: www.aaltovg.com
• Kristo Ovaska, kristo@aaltovg.com, +358 50 593 8907
• Natalie Gaudet, natalie@aaltovg.com, +358 50 599 9442

Aalto Venture Garage’s Bootcamp is an intensive two week training program for the best startup teams from all around the world. Bootcamp is free and supported by Aalto University. It is designed to help pre-seed startups to become successful ventures with the coaching of the Nordics’ best entrepreneurs and investors.

1.6.2010

This is a monthly update by Design Factory research team (DFRT), that is Tua, Senni, Maria, Anu, Meri-Maaria and Miko.

WHAT’S UP?

• Miko has joined our forces from PDR’s PKII project. He will be working with e.g. start up and ADF cases, as well as the LUTUS project.
• DFRT now starts each weekly meeting with a quick, 10-minute rough prototyping exercise to live up to the spirit of ADF and collect experiences of different methods. So far we’ve e.g. illustrated our research phase and goals with play-doh and fingerpaint. We can recommend the practice as a fun way to start meetings!
• DFRT organized a two-day module for Dipoli’s Diploma in Product Development supplementary education program on the context of product development. PD6 was utilized to work on the problems they had named, and a series of experimentation exercises were given as homework to encourage making an actual impact on behavior.
• The teaching development partnership program (DF-Opekumppani) has progressed to first meetings with teachers from Aalto University Schools.
• DFRT is starting a new case on creating business concepts, focusing on a design thinking and strategy perspective. At the moment, we are recruiting entrepreneurs for interviews.
• Anu participated in Future workshop on co-operation and relationship between construction industry and Aalto civil engineering department. She also joined the planning of teachers’ pedagogical training program (60cr) for Aalto teachers. BE-program will be part of the forthcoming program.
• Miko will spend June and July in Paris and will be visiting the Ecole des Ponts ParisTech to see the recently established d.school Paris/d.thinking Paris design program.

Interesting reading:

• If you are interested in rush and time limits, check out A. R. Hochschild’s book “The Time Bind”.

Until next month,
DFRT

Want to spend your summer at Design Factory? Feel free to do so in any case, but here is a great excuse:

Product Sound Design Summer School, August 23-26 2010, Aalto University, Design Factory, Espoo, Finland

Future products will rely on our natural capabilities of continuous and physical interaction. Moreover, for the best experience in their use, they need to stimulate, but not saturate, all our senses. Our sense of hearing is quite advanced; yet only a few product developers, engineers, marketing teams, and designers know how to make use of it properly. The COST-SID action, over the years, has developed a growing body of methods, tools, and techniques to get you started.

Our mission in this summer school is to educate the future product design and development team members with a specific competence on interactive sound. The training school is strategically positioned as a first step in a longer research and training on the integration of SID product sound design methods with  Product Design and Development, as thought at the Aalto University and MIT, for example.

Upon completing the summer school, the participants will be able to

• use effective strategies for concept generation and communication regarding the usage of sound in future products,
• prototype and evaluate an interactive sonic product according to a scenario given by the partnering companies  HipUI and  Powerkiss
• earn 2 ECTS from the Aalto University.

Target Participants

The target participants are 16-20 students in the last year of masters studies, or first two years of PhD studies in design, engineering, or economics. They will be selected by the relevance of their studies or research to the product sound design. We expect about half of the trainees to be Aalto students.

Application

The applicants should send,

• a CV,
• a letter of motivation that clearly indicates the applicant’s motivation, previous experience with interactive product sound design, and expectations from this training activity,
• an official transcript of completed and remaining studies, all in Portable Document Format (PDF) to  Cumhur Erkut latest by Monday, June 21, 2010.

The summer school requires no registration fee. For the selected participants from outside of Finland, basic financial support that would cover the most economic travel and accommodation costs will be provided by the COST IC0601 Action SID.

More information:

• Summer School website