RICK IT

portfolio
INDEX

2 Introduction
4 The team
6 The metaphor
8 Reading instructions
8 The artifacts
8 First Steps
Framing the Project
10 Invitation
13 Staging
18 Interviews
Focusing on a Concept
20 Chart
28 Story
Designing the Concept
30 Image
31 Proposal
37 Possible future implementation
39 Summary of the designerly Intelligence
INTRODUCTION Organizing an academic conference it’s not an easy task.
Right now, at Aalto University there is no tool to facilitate and
simplify the job of the conferences’ organizers: every brick needed
to build a good conference is scattered around and it’s up to who is
organizing the conference to look for all this tiny bricks and bring
them together.
But what if there was a way to improve how a conference is
organized?
During this six-week project our team focused on finding an
answer to this question, investigating the matter and then co-
creating the frame for a solution with the people who are directly
concerned: our target users.
In order to do this, we crafted six design artifacts that helped us
and other people to understand the project and the path chosen.

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 Irma Savolainen
Background in service design; from Finland.

THE TEAM
Brick-it is an all female team composed by four members.

Alessia Menegolli
Background in product design; from Italy.

Carolin Schabbing
Background in integrated design; from Germany.

Xuyang Zhang
Background in product design; from China.

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 THE METAPHOR: LEGO BRICKS
The symbols of our project are lego bricks. Every lego brick
symbolizes a fragment that organizers should use in order to build
their conference. Right now within Aalto University, these pieces are
all scattered due to the lack of a centralized system for conference
organization. Therefore, the opportunity we saw was to collect bricks
all over Aalto University to build a new service in collaboration with
future contributors.
We want to facilitate the process of creating and organizing a
conference by giving to the organizers the possibility to find all
the useful bricks they need in one place. Concretely, this means
creating a platform where all the scattered bricks could be collected
5 and used to build a bridge toward better conferences. 6

HOW TO ENGAGE WITH THE
PORTFOLIO
This portfolio is thought to present the reader with an overview of
the design process that lays behind our concept. The reader will be
able to go through all the steps taken to achieve the final result. The
tools and the ideas will be presented with a logical and chronological
order, even if in the reality the process was not linear but iterative.
Over the weeks, ideas and solutions were always questioned and
further tested with the help of our target users: a workshop, several
interviews and meaningful conversations were the tools that helped
the most during all the process. The uninterrupted contact with the
users allowed the project to be validate and questioned by them
7 directly, providing useful insights and advices on how to continue.
THE DESIGN ARTIFACTS
During the weeks, six design artifacts were created in order to
facilitate the process and move forward to the final concept. These
artifacts followed an ideal order: invitation, staging, chart, story,
image and proposal. They allowed us to start by identifying our
target users and invite them to work with us to co-create a solution.
Furthermore, the middle steps were useful to understand in more
depth the problem and by trying to visualize it, a better knowledge
on how to present it and talk about it was achieved. In the end, the
final proposal and the image concluded our path in this project.
THE FIRST STEPS
The very first step for our group was to meet and brainstorm about
the brief given to us by Aalto Conference Services. We tried to
deconstruct the problem in order to achieve a better knowledge
and insight about every part of it. Brainstorming was also useful to
pinpoint our target users: PhD Students, Organizers and Professors,
which are the main figures when talking about the organization of a
conference. We decided to focus on this target group because they
are the people involved in organizing academic conferences in the
present but we also assumed that they were interested in organizing
conferences in the future. This assumption revealed itself as true
throughout the workshop and the interviews. 8
 FRAMING THE PROJECT
INVITATION

Once we defined and specified our target users, the next step was to ideate and create an invitation to
attract them to participate in our workshop. Our main concern was to make the invitation appealing
because the users were known to have busy schedules all week long, but in order for us to achieve a
great number of insight, we needed a great number of participants.
Our invitation could be seen as the symbol of our project and metaphor: it is a little box containing a
piece of lego and all the information about the workshop. The people invited could read more about
the venue, the time and our project by unfolding the box. The lego brick was a physical touchpoint to
engage the people: it then was used in the workshop as a part of one of the tasks.
The box was easy to unfold and fold again thanks to the usage of origami techniques and a sticker that
kept the upper part close, securing the lego brick inside the box.

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 Around forty physical invitations were delivered
hand to hand by us to PhD students, organizers and
professors. In addition to the information about the
workshop, printed on the box there was a QR code that,
if scanned, let the participants register themselves to
the event.
Twenty-five people signed up through the code, but
just twenty showed up to the actual workshop.
The physical invitation went along with a digital
invitation with the form of an email. More than six
hundreds emails were sent to our target users from
different departments. The emails allowed us to
reach a more wide audience, even though the physical
invitation were the key of our project. In fact, by
reaching the future participants in person we had the
possibility to talk to them and explain our research
and what our aims were.

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FRAMING THE PROJECT
STAGING

After handing out the invitations, the next step was to prepare the workshop. The time chosen for it
was during lunchtime in order to give our participants the possibility to fit the meeting into their busy
schedule. Furthermore, we offered them lunch so that people could have a further reason to join the
workshop.
We wanted to create a relaxed environment where people could have something to eat and coffee, not
completing the tasks in a stressful way: we wanted our workshop not to feel like a workshop, but more
like a chat between people interested in the same subject.
Since the time was tight, only three tasks were designed, but these three tasks were divided into six
tables, so that we could gather enough data from each task.
The first exercise was an icebreaker thought for the people to divide into groups and to get to know each
other briefly. To achieve this, the participants had to form a line accordingly to their own experience in
conference organizing or participating, but they weren’t allowed to talk. Just with gestures and body
language they had to understand the experience of others and choose their place consequently. When
the line was formed, they introduced themselves one by one, revealing their actual experience. After
that, the line was rearranged accordingly to the actual knowledge of the participants and then they were
divided into groups of three to four people.
After that, the actual tasks were explained briefly.
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 The first task was an individual one were every participant was
required to write down the bad and the good experiences they had
during conferences, both when organizing and when participating.
They had at their disposal paper, sticky notes and markers.
The second task was a hands-on exercise. Participants were asked
to build the conference of their dreams by using lego bricks. In this
task they could also use the lego brick included in the invitation that
they took with themselves at the workshop. Every team had two
people building and one people writing and documenting what was
going on.
At first, it was difficult for them to actually start to build a design
artifact using the lego bricks but after a while, when they acclimatized
to the challenge, they came up with interesting ideas and prototypes.
Some of the most interesting outcomes were a flying platform for
conference and a robot designed to throw out people not interested
in the conference who just disturb others.
The last task was a group exercise. One member of the group as in
charge of defining a problem and the other team members had to
try to come up with solutions for that specific problem.
By the end of the workshop everybody was able to express their
feelings and opinions on every task, but we also thought about
a method to keep in touch with the participants, in case they
weren’t satisfied enough with the insights provided. Some blank
Aalto business cards were designed and left on the tables, so that
participants could fill them in with their personal details and be
contacted again by us. We gathered together ten business cards.
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 FRAMING THE PROJECT
INTERVIEWS
At the end of the workshop we promised our participants to deliver them the results of our research
and of our project, in case they wanted to keep on working and giving feedback to us. In addition, we
collected personal information about the people interested in having a further individual interview
with us. Having said that, the next logical step was to book interviews and chats with people from the
workshop to gather further and more in-depth knowledge.
During the following week of the workshop we had four interviews: one with a professor, one with an
organizer and two with PhD students.
The week after, we organized three more interviews with two PhD students and one professor.
During the first interviews we used a set of cards designed as a consequence of the workshop: every
card showed one topic emerged during the workshop’s tasks. The interviewees were asked to choose
from the card pile the ones that they thought as most important and explain why. Combining these
insights with the ones from the workshop led us to define a specific problem we wanted to solve.
After that, we booked another set of interviews in order to achieve specific knowledge on the problem
and gather information and feedbacks from the people involved. This helped us also to understand if
the road we choose was the right one or not.

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FOCUSING ON A CONCEPT
CHART

Insights from workshop

The insights gathered from our workshop revealed us that the most common problems in conference
organizing could be solved with more efficient and trustworthy communication between different
stakeholders. This problem is related to Aalto Service information not reaching the organizers and to
organizers having difficulty in communicating both inside and outside the team.
There were also multiple mentions practicalities not being executed the way they are supposed to, and
that there are often problems with handling the registration.
Then, on the contrary, when registration, communication and practicalities have been organized well, the
workshop participants mentioned those as good experiences.
At this stage we were able to understand the amount of different problems the organizers are experiencing,
but were still lacking the focus for our solution. We decided to move on to interviews where we could
19 gather more specific information about the problems and find clues towards our problem space. 20
 Insights form interviews
We gave the interviewees a chance to prioritize a set of the most
crucial elements of conference organizing with a deck of cards. The
importance of each theme was quite subjective to the interviewees,
but we were able to identify a few reoccurring themes. For instance,
conference attendees put a lot of emphasis on the topic, as that is
their primary reason for going to these gatherings. Registration was
mentioned again as a general problem, but it seemed to be focusing
more on the technical difficulties of the systems rather than the
organizing side of it. Practicalities of organizing and managing the
budget were also brought up
Based on these new insights we found our research focus from the
conference management and the internal communication between
organizing parties. Until this point we had been focusing on all the
possible organizers, but wanted to especially find information from
doctoral candidates.
However, based on the interviews it seemed that there is not much
difference between doctoral candidates and professors who organize
conferences. The interviews showed that the process of attending
organizing teams starts at different stage of studies in different
countries, so the level of expertise in organizing differs between
researchers based on their home university. One interesting finding
was that in Finland undergraduate students are not as included in
the planning process as in some other countries where they might
have the main responsibility of the organizing.
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Finding the focus
Crafting the chart was surprisingly difficult for us, because
we didn’t know on what level should we look at the problem
and how detailed we should be with our solution.
We reached the final understanding of our scope based
on the commentary on our intermediate presentation,
where we realized that our way of looking at qualitative
data through a very simple quantitative lense was not
detailed enough. Therefore, we analyzed the data again
and decided to craft an illustration on all the different
layers of stakeholders who can potentially benefit from
our problem solving and ideation. On the base layer we
set the doctoral students who are oftentimes in a big role
for conference organizing in Aalto. Their main need for
this scope seemed to be that they want to organize and
participate in conferences relevant to them. The next
layer represents the organizer which can be a research
group or a professional organization helping Aalto with
the organizing.
As we established in the interviews, their core need
revolves around organizing conferences as efficiently
as possible. Above that we have Aalto Services who are
offering different services for conference organizers
in Aalto University. Their main driver was to help the
conferences actually happen and be as good as possible
from the point of management and efficiency.
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 Drafting the chart for our design space begun with the idea of our
possible solution affecting both the physical and digital layers
of organizing. We felt that help for internal communication is
needed and that there should be some tips or instructions for
event organizing and project management. The possible design
solution is therefore illustrated on two layers. The digital layer is
meant to support the physical one and offer better chances for
physical meetings between different parts of the organizing group.
The information flows to the organizers from the information pool
which is a combination of information by Aalto Services and the
organizing teams. The organizers can draw information from that
pool and also add their own plans, ideas and suggestions, so all the
organizing entities can stay on top of the planning process.
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 The design opportunity
Based on this information spreading and management focus we also crafted our final chart for the
design opportunity which demonstrates that a lot of the bricks for conference organizing are already
existing, but finding and compiling them to a staircase that leads us to a solid construction is not always
easy.
There is also huge amounts of data from past conferences which is not gathered anywhere.
The current situation with decentralized service information and the vastly different conference
organizing teams create an opportunity to design a solution to help all teams individually with a
personalized service. The solution would be to centralize the information and help each team individually
with the practical execution of the conference. The solution could rely on the data offered by Aalto
Services and past conferences.
Right now, the information needed to organize a conference is hard to find in Aalto. That’s why we
need to connect the organizers to the relevant things and informations that can help them to build the
conference they are dreaming of.

The two main drivers are information and people working together: these are the two links and
conntections that keep together all the steps of the stairs and that give sense to them. Organizing a
conference can be stressful but it’s surely also a lot of fun: this experience it’s only possible thanks to

25 the physical meetings that allow people to gather together. 26

FOCUSING ON A CONCEPT Emma is organizing a Back at the office
conference in 5 months I wish Tom would do his
STORY work! Now I am stuck So, how is it gong? Whoo, I see, the team uses
with mine... a common platform?!
After visualizing our design space and reaching a And it would be easier if This tool is designed to
I don’t know how to
conclusion on which path to take, we crafted a story to everyone could put their handle this help people who are
info in the same place.... organizing a conference
conference planning
show both the problems and the solutions. We focused anymore...
to manage the process

mainly on three issues: the first one is related to the It might help you!
e?
organizers approaching for the first time to a conference r coffe Oh, but have you heard of
H i! Up fo Aalto conference tool for It can be easily
having no clue on where to start. The second problem teams? found online...
here!
is that sometimes, notes and important emails get lost No, what’s that?
under the great number of shared files. Finally, the task
division could not be decided so clearly. The solution to Let’s go, I’ll show you!

this problems is a platform that provide the user with a

With the Aalto
customizable pre-made template that suits her needs; managemeng
For instance, Yeah! Thanks! Everyone will tool, everything’s
that helps the team working on the same conference to It’s a modular you can add to be on the same page...so worked out fine in
store the files in a productive and easy-to-find way; and system, your your template much easier now! the end.
group customizes the feature of Emma spread the
that provide the team members with a task manager tool, the template with the task word to all her
the features that manager. In this colleagues, and
in order to always make clear who is responsible for what suit you best way everyone the best part was
will always that also people
task. know the from different
pending jobs departments as
After a first draft of the story, we had a peer-to-peer and what’s her can use the
meeting that allowed us to spot the flaws in the first already been tool. Maybe in the
done by whom near future Emma
version of the comic, such as the non-clear readability. will be able to
organize that
All clear?
After the comment section, we improved our story by cross-department
No problem! conference that
adding some background, the description of the platform Bye! she’s been
dreaming of... who
and the beneficial results brought by working with it. knows!

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 DESIGNING THE CONCEPT
IMAGE

The image is a visual summary of our project and provides the watcher with an overview of our metaphor,
the problem and the solution.
The image is a combination of three different components: two photos and a pay-off. The pay-off is
“build the conference of your dreams”: the verb “build” refers to both the physical and virtual layer,
because it’s only by combining these two layers that a valuable conference can be organized: organizers
as well as attendees can create a memorable event, rather than just an academic conference.
In the front layer picture, representing the physical world, the building action is shown thanks to the
usage of lego bricks. This refers to our initial metaphor and it provides the watcher with a symbolic
picture of what building a conference looks like. The environment described is a meeting between the
members of the same organizing team: everyone is contributing to build the conference by putting
together all the scattered lego bricks in order to shape the conference of their dreams.
Underneath this layer, another picture is partially visible. This image represents the Aalto management
tool proposed by our team. The image is just partially visible to represent how the virtual layer can help
the organizers to achieve their goals in the physical layer. As the foundations are an essential part for
building a house, the virtual layer is critical to build a better physical layer when talking about organizing
a conference.
In the Aalto management screenshot, the same tools as in the physical layer can be seen. This represents
the fact that the layers can be overlapping and they constantly shape each other, one making the other
better and vice versa.

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DESIGNING THE CONCEPT
PROPOSAL

Finally, the proposal that sums up our design process can be addressed as a centralized and shared
platform within all Aalto members interested and committed to organizing academic conferences. This
platform is an online and offline conference tool where organizers, professors and PhD students can
work together in order to build in an efficient and productive way the conference they are dreaming of.
This happens thanks to two main features: the platform gathers all the important information together,
including advices from previous experiences, allowing the users to be connected to what it’s most
relevant for them. In addition the tool can bring together the organizers in physical meetings in order
to discuss and build their conference.
Members can register the conference they’re working on and create a place where all the team members
can work together and keep updated on the progresses, thanks to the different tools available for the
group working, such as task manager, calendar, video calls, etc. The modular template is customizable
by the team, so that everyone can choose what suits their work style best.
This management tool designed specifically for Aalto Services would allow all the Aalto people working
on a conference to plan it in an easier way and to improve the communication between the team
members. In addition, since the platform would be centralized, people from every department could
have access to it, facilitating and encouraging the development of cross-departments conferences.
Moreover, with a tool designed ad-hoc for Aalto, the organizers and Aalto Services wouldn’t be forced
anymore to purchase this kind of tools from a third party, leaving that part of the budget that usually is
31 reserved for this available to be spent on other things. 32
 Using the platform is simple: the first time, one just need to log in and create a new space for his or
her conference. In order to do that, a set of questions will be asked to the users. Those questions are
generical and can be the same for every conference, like for example how many days the conference
is or how many people can participate. After answering, the user is provided with a premade template
thought to suit best his or her choices. The template will also provide the user with suggested areas
to cover and basic tasks related to that topic. Also a list of ideas to discuss during the first meeting is
generated, so that also users who are approaching the world of organizing a conference for the first time
are guided and helped, and don’t have to start from scratch. The suggested team can be customized, as
nothing is permanent: the user can modify, delete and add different group works or tasks.
The platform is also thought to support the physical meetings that take place when organizing a
conference: it’s only by bringing the organizers together that the conference can be built.
Thanks to the premade template, suggestions about what to discuss in the first meeting are done.
During the actual meeting, the team can record the session using the specific tool in the platform. This
will allow them to automatically generate the minutes of the conference and to go through what was
discussed, without having a person in charge of typing that down.
The pinwall, then, allows the participants to the meeting to write down quick notes or to pin ideas to
their wall, like for example suggestions they found in the previous experience browser. The pins can be
managed and directed to different people or to different tools, for example to the task manager. Inside
the tool, then, the pin can be managed and designated to different people, who will then have to carry
33 out that task. 34
 To sum up, we think that Aalto management tool would be beneficial
because:

It gathers all the information together and users are connected to

what it’s most relevant for them;
It aims to bring the organizers together in physical meetings;
It enables the faculty to organize conferences in a way which offers
them the freedom to focus on the actual important things;
It encourages people from different department to work together;
It makes more clear the task division and process, constantly
providing real time updates on the finished jobs and on what is still
to be done;
It is easy to manage the files using the tools;
It can be used as a calendar to remind to everyone each other
schedules and tasks, and to find common free time for meetings;
It provides users with a big data pool, where precious and useful
information about the previous conferences can be found. Plus,
everyone can add their own experience in order to help future users;
It allows the users to find useful contacts (for example staff
members) in an easy and direct way, without spending time on
35 useless researches on Aalto webpages. 36
POSSIBLE FUTURE IMPLEMENTATIONS

Our suggestion would be that this tool could be implemented as a part of Aalto Inside. This could allow
people from different departments to join and use the same tool. In this way it would encourage cross-
department conferences. It can also be easier for users to reach volunteers interested in the same topic
that are willing to help even if they don’t belong to the same department.
Implementing the tool in the website should be done in different stages: first implementing one part
(organization) and then include the others (like registration). At the end, the result should be a place
where different tool to help organizing and handling a conference are gathered together: not only the
tool presented in this portfolio, but also a tool for handling the registration, since this problem was
brought up different times by different people.
37 38
 SUMMARY OF THE DESIGNERLY During these six weeks, we tried to integrate our project with some of the practices and the principles of

INTELLIGENCE Human Centered Design and Co-Design. The most visible and evident part was the attempt to use a Co-
Creation approach during the workshop and the interviews. These were two of the key elements that helped
and allowed us to break down the problem and figure out a possible solution. The insights and the comments
of the people involved in the topic were essential to us throughout all the process.
We also did several deep interviews based on the information from the workshop, during this process we
understood their background, past experience, their feelings and their more, which helped us to be more
empathic. We divided the interviewees into two parts, for one part we just asked some questions, and for
another part we also asked them to help us test our initial solution model. Then We found out what were the
problems and analyzed the reasons of the problems. After that we tried to give the solution to the problems.
We also drew the storyboard to make people feel the problems and our solutions directly, which was also an
empathic design process.
Then we built our service platform, during this we not only considered the functions of the platform but also
the interactive methods between users and the platform to make it easy to use.

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