We continued the sprint to wrap up the final details of preparing the studio space for our first guests. This involved lots of tiny things like getting the our name on the sign downstairs and finding a good water pitcher. Seungho took care of these with aplomb.
Meanwhile, Rodrigo and Johanna have been wading through piles of official documents and lots of phone calls to continue their work drawing out the organizational chart of the education system. This sort of work very easily turns into spaghetti, so we've been taking it slow. Part of the ramp up phase for the studio assistants is a nice dinner to get to know everyone. Annikki and I had the pleasure of taking the Sustainability Studio and the Ageing Studio to dinner this week which means that all three teams have officially booted up.
Marco, Hanna, Annikki, and I spent Thursday in Jyväskylä, where Sitra sponsored a workshop with a wide cross section of stakeholders who deal with issues relating to the elderly in that city. We heard a bit about some of the challenges of delivering care to a broad variety of different groups of people. One of the key issues in Jyväskylä, as well as the rest of Finland, is that it includes a dense urban core as well as vast expanses of lightly populated rural areas. Delivering equal levels of care to people in such disperate physical environments becomes a tricky proposition. This was preliminary work for the Ageing Studio which happens in early June.
And tonight things suddenly became very real. Marco and I met the Education Studio members who've just flown in from Singapore, London, San Francisco, Boston, as well as the two locals from Helsinki, and took them out to a neighborhood dinner in Töölö. Shaking the hands of these excellent people who've come to spend a week with us really underscored the fact that, oh yeah, this thing we've been planning for over a year begins tomorrow!
FREE BOOK Including an introduction to strategic design, a how-to manual for the HDL Studio Model, and practical examples.