A bathroom mirror that makes you a better person.

Mirö (2017)

As a part of the International Design Business Management (IDBM) program at Aalto University we were tasked with development of a new product concept as a part of the Interdisciplinary Product Development course. The result was Mirö - a smart bathroom mirror overlay that helps you make and break habits day by day.

PROBLEM

We decided to focus our design research on behavioural psychology and rapidly became fascinated with the idea that making and breaking a habit takes 28 days.

We would design a product that coached people to reprogram their habits and effect meaningful, long-lasting change in their lives.

METHODOLOGY

We began by identifying a set of habits that we personally would like to change, and created a timeline of events where these habits had an impact in daily routine.

With a detailed user story, we searched for touch points where interaction could occur on a daily basis and found one - the bathroom. Every day, morning and night.

Looking for the right context for introspection, we conducted roleplaying and walk-throughs and zeroed in on a significant UX opportunity - the individual’s time with their own reflection in the bathroom mirror.

From here we designed a product and selected technology to create a habit tracking over-mirror display with touch-free interaction and facial recognition.

We created wireframes and high-fidelity mockups to detail the UX on the mirror and mobile app and also a corresponding brand identity, to communicate mirö as a persona that projects relatability through vulnerability.

THE TEAM

I worked closely with energetic designer and strategist Michelle Belgrod.

MY ROLE

Team lead & pitching
Service design

I worked closely with Michelle and led us through several design instruments to formulate a product proposal. I created wireframes, evaluated the brand’s fit with customer segments and presented the final concept to the panel of judges.

“You bravely limited the amount of fuctions to support your core idea. Which makes your concept different from what we usually do with mobile phones.”

— Heli Säde, Co-founder SADE Innovations, Lecturer at Aalto University

THE OUTCOME

The project received outstanding praise from a panel of judges for its comprehensive consideration of brand, product and business model.

“Beautiful slides, nice mirö branding with full visual identity. Package details and graphics. Good work. I still get smile on my face: The bathroom mirror + self improvement : ) I do need Mirö.”

— Heli Säde, Co-founder SADE Innovations, Lecturer at Aalto University

Mass concepting for an urban design community

Design District Helsinki (DDH) is community of designers, artists and craftsmen in central Helsinki who collaborate and host local events to promote their works.

Design District 2025

In collaboration Booncon Pixels, DDH approached the International Design Business Management (IDBM) Program to generate concepts representing the future of the district over the next decade.

METHODOLOGY

The project focused on mass idea generation and field work throughout a two week period. My team focused on helping the Art Galleries & Museums surface in the design community.

We determined that the galleries and museums of the district did not have a clear role in the design community and pondered the question of 'art vs design'.

We performed rapid ideation, assumption reversal and used valuation matrix to focus our idea: to build an educational experience that reveals the intent, skills & craftsmanship behind the pieces.

Meanwhile, the class distributed side responsibilities for a process that would merge the combined efforts of each team into final deliverables.

Outcome

We hosted a guided walk-through exhibition at Päivälehden Museo to demonstrate our final concepts. Guests were taken on a choreographed tour of the ideas and given the opportunity to interact with them. Finally, a concept book detailing all ideas and insights was awarded to the Design District.

The event was very well received and we were also invited to present our ideas to the board.

THE TEAM

The project involved the entire IDBM class. 50 students with different cultural and professional backgrounds worked in 14 teams, focused on varying physical or virtual aspects of the DDH community.

MY ROLE

Team lead & facilitator
Speaker & MC

As well as facilitating my own team through guided ideation, I took the lead in organizing the class' overall effort to combine each team's outcome into a concrete set of deliverables. 

I was MC for the final presentation at Päivälehden Museo and main speaker when we were asked to present again to the board of directors.

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A wifi hack for a p2p school at burning man

Koulu On Fire brought the Koulu School concept to Burning Man, Black Rock City - center stage. Koulu School sets learning free to make education accessible to everyone.

KOULU YEARBOOK (2016)

We identified a need to extend the Koulu experience beyond Burning Man and capture content from interactions with burners.

The Koulu Yearbook app allows burners to take selfies using the webcam on their smartphone to register as teachers, find lessons they might enjoy and provide a way to keep in contact with their students after the burn.

MY ROLE

Service Designer
Software Developer

I conducted workshops to design the service workflow as a team and I collaborated with the infinitely clever Peter Tapio on the hardware & server aspects. I also designed & built the app itself, packaging it to be shipped to Black Rock City.

OUTCOME

There were challenges. Many burners carry their smartphones as a camera, but there's no internet access - so native apps or internet-based web apps were out of the question. The project also had minimal budget constraints and the harsh desert conditions to consider.

To meet these challenges, we hacked a ZSun WiFi card reader to create a custom, intelligent WiFi hot spot - a captive portal like those found at an airport, which loaded our app instead of logging in.

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TECHNOLOGY

Angular 2
Webpack
Custom WebRTC photo booth
PHP on Lighttpd
ArrestDB and SQLite
OpenWRT on hacked ZSun Wifi router

You can find my lab notes on hacking the ZSun on my blog.

A strategy to globalize a furniture startup

HAVUU TOMORROW (2014-2015)

Havuu is a Finnish startup with an innovative application of Kerto® wood to build modular space solutions & furniture. They approached the International Design Business Management (IDBM) program at Aalto University with goal of expanding their business model through a 6 month collaboration with our team.

THE BRIEF

The project dealt primarily with business model generation as well as product and service development.

“We want to internationalize Havuu and reach new markets.”

— Jukka Rissanen, CEO, Havuu

After profiling Havuu, we refined our brief to target current trends towards scale-able open office spaces, in response to Havuu's internal shift towards tailored space design.

METHODOLOGY

We realized the key to Havuu's successful internationalization would be finding a global niche.

We conducted a comparative analysis of global markets to find countries with related cultural themes and shifts towards open office design. 

We traveled to Japan as a case study, because of the significant cultural difficulties that companies there overcome in their transition towards open office culture. 

We performed interviews, field research and conducted a workshop with local design professionals. 

We created personas and future scenarios to represent our findings and found a global niche - combining Havuu's unique design knowledge with their ability for rapid prototyping. 

THE TEAM

I worked in an multi-national, inter-disciplinary team with four talented characters.

Yifan Zhang, China
UX & Industrial Design

Junmei Lu, China
Business & Management

Taru Mikkola, Finland
Business & Marketing

Satu-Päivikki Kyykkä, Finland
Product Design

MY ROLE

Team lead & facilitator
Technical expertise

I facilitated concept development and decision making, challenged perceptions and focused the team on tangible results.

I presented our work to peers and Havuu, and coached the team's presentation skills.

I jointly designed and acted as facilitator in our highly regarded 'Towards a Worklife Utopia' workshop at i.school, University of Tokyo.

CO-CREATION WORKSHOP

A major tool for our research when on-site in Japan was the workshop with local academics and furniture design professionals at i.school, University of Tokyo.

Teams championed their concepts, which explored the emotional, practical and fantastic ideas of future work spaces, painting a picture of consumer desirability.

The workshop was created jointly by Yifan and I.

“Just wanted to thank you for organizing a fabulous workshop at our studio. And also to congratulate you on a fantastically professional attitude - nicely done! Haven’t seen such levels of professionalism in any IDBM student team before. You can be proud of yourselves!”

— Miika Lehtonen, Program Manager, i.school

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CONVERGENCE

I guided a process of convergence to distill the outcomes from the workshop into a coherent set of insights, which Yifan then turned into a deck of insight cards for Havuu.

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HAVUU MINIATURES

Based on our success of 3D printing Havuu's product line for the workshop, I also printed an extended series of miniatures that Havuu could use for marketing and prototyping purposes.

THE SOLUTION

In addition to the insight cards and miniatures, the Havuu team delivered an in-depth concept book detailing two inter-related branding initiatives that Havuu could engage in order to appeal to the global open office niche.

Havuu Hub

The Hub represents a medium-to-long term strategy, extending Havuu's need for an expanded showroom to offer a rapid prototyping work shop and open work space for furniture and space designers. Over time, it builds Havuu's capability to capture design insights from the implementation & user tiers.

Havuu Online Playground

The Online Playground represents a digital outreach, building an online catalog of Havuu-sponsored and community-contributed CAD & 3D designs that can be ordered & manufactured as prototypes with a single click. The resulting community extends Havuu's brand globally.

OUTCOME

Our concepts were presented at IDBM's industry project showcase at Lonna May, 2015 to broad praise and the final deliverables remain valuable tools for Havuu's strategic team to this day.

The team's inquisitive nature, playful approach and thought-provoking insights provided a valuable counter-point to Havuu's ongoing challenges as a startup in the saturated furniture market.

An operational platform for a freight provider

Neway Transport are a digitized freight carrier in Australia, specializing in sensitive and high value freight. They have branches in 6 states and operate nation-wide.

“Seb’s complete understanding of our intricate business requirements together with our positive business relationship has attributed to these successful outcomes for our business.”

— Gordon Boulton, General Manager

WEBFREIGHT (SINCE 2010)

The Webfreight system is Neway's internal, premiere software platform that manages their day-to-day operations, through which they also co-ordinate activity with their clients.

The Webfreight platform handles client records, reporting and quotations, consignment orders and storage, incidents, truck allocation, as well as specialized services, such as progress updates & visual proof-of-delivery for key clients via handheld devices.

MY ROLE

Product Owner
Software Developer
Service Designer

I collect & resolve issues, design & develop new features and take care of overall server health. I've done disaster recovery and major server upgrades. I've also provided technical advice to leadership and represented Neway while collaborating with some of their key clients

OUTCOME

I've handled over 400 tickets, modernized several system components and built an AS2 messaging link with their main client. I introduced test coverage for mission-critical system components, built an automated test & deployment pipeline and trained additional support staff for redundancy to achieve a 99.97% up-time.

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TECHNOLOGY

Windows Server 2012
SQL Server 2012
ASP.Net WebForms and C#
SOAP/XML Web Services
AS2 Messaging
AppVeyor

PARTNER SERVICES (2016)

Neway Partner Services was a strategic pilot project to upgrade & expand the specialized services of Webfreight.

The project prototyped a platform that allowed Neway to better tailor its specialized freight services for individual clients, whilst providing a client API, live data feeds, metrics and reporting.

MY ROLE

Product Owner
Software Developer
Service Designer

On the back of my previous working knowledge of Neway's operational model, I led design & development of the prototype system, collaborating with specialist developer Dale Holborow to iterate three varying implementations.

OUTCOME

The project presented significant challenges due to the need for each client's services to be completely customized. The final prototype was connected to live data sources and successfully showed that it could consume client-tailored services.

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TECHNOLOGY

ServiceStack and C#
SQLite & SQL Server
Quartz
OrmLite
AngularJS 1.5 (component model)
Material Design
Reactive Extensions (both server & client)
Gulp

An e-commerce platform for pharmaceuticals

Planet Drugs Direct

Planet Drugs Direct (PDD) is a successful online pharmaceutical e-commerce site consisting of a global network of chemists, doctor and shipping providers.

The PDD platform manages customer orders & prescriptions, billing, customer service & reporting as well as management of the content & product catalog.

MY ROLE

Software Developer

I was engaged by Evolutia to assist in backlog management, by fixing outstanding issues and developing priority new features. I was also responsible for designing & implementing a testing layer for the platform's back-end infrastructure.

OUTCOME

The pharmaceutical industry is especially competitive and challenging, yet we maintained the health of the server and released changes at a high pace. I built a new high-performance large image storage service and also wrote 1000+ unit tests to bring code coverage from zero to 100%.

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TECHNOLOGY

ASP.Net
SQL Server 2008
WCF
JQuery
NUnit & NMoq

Note: Planet Drugs Direct has since been acquired and has undergone several changes.

A facebook app for a cancer not-for-profit

CanTeen is the Australian organisation supporting young people living with cancer. They also perform leading edge research into the emotional and social impacts of cancer.

BANDANNA ME (2013)

National Bandanna Day is an iconic charity campaign, operated by CanTeen Australia, with the mission of raising money and awareness. The 'Bandanna Me' Facebook App was created to parallel the campaign with a digital outreach, spreading awareness across users of Facebook.

Users picked one of their own Facebook profile photos and used an embedded editor to position a bandanna overlay on their own profile photo. The app also collected credit card donations via a merchant gateway.

MY ROLE

Product Owner / Producer
Service Designer

I was approached by CanTeen Australia and Match Media and worked closely with their campaign manager to co-ordinate the project milestones with their above-the-line efforts. I collaborated with award-winning UX designer Glen McPherson and developers Cubed Digital Media for the execution.

OUTCOME

The campaign was released throughout the month of October 2013, featured on Mumbrella (credited as Semi Da Vinci) and achieved a 5.83% peak conversion on traffic.

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TECHNOLOGY

ASP.Net MVC and C#
Facebook Graph API
Responsive HTML/CSS for Web & Mobile
Merchant Gateway Integration