5 weeks in, still going strong!

Dear readers,

First of all, thank you for the ones reading my blog. I hope it gives you some great insights on Finland, but also to understand the meaning of an exchange and how it can change you. An experience which in my opinion everybody should witness with their own eyes.

As I told you I am not the best with blogs, although I really enjoy writing them. This second blog will be written, where you keep in mind this was over a three week period of time. I am sorry for the inconvenience, nevertheless time flies by when you are having fun.

(If you are not interested in this long story about my design week you can skip to this part) Because parties are there!! *****

The week I had been talking about: the Design Sprint. This was a great opportunity to get in touch with new tools. The tools we discussed are processed in a PowerPoint we had to create to show our progress as a group. But what is a design sprint and how does it work from begin to end? I will make this short because it is a one week/ 5 day ‘work out’.

On Monday, we sat with the client, a big group of us listening to what the City of Porvoo had to say. The had two bullet points: create a neighborhood event which brings them together in a positive way and find new venues to use. We listened and created our tiny vision, including our goal and the customer path in our teacher made teams, and started our adventure on Tuesday.

On Tuesday we visited a school before the whole project, this was an important day. With this we tried understanding what was already here in Porvoo and what had yet to come. The question seemed interesting from a Process Design approach, where questions were not directly concentrated on the event but about the customer. ‘How Might We’ Questions is an interesting tool, which I would like to recommend if you are just starting a concept. Most of the time there are so many questions which you do not know how to answer yet. This is the time to be negative, write as many ‘How Might We’ Questions down and afterwards put them together the ones that seem similar. Now you have to decide which ones are the most important for your prototype and be real about presenting something at the end of the week.

On Wednesday we divided the work of the ‘How Might We’ Questions, we had two important tasks: How Might We deal with the marketing and How Might We create a perfect experience. This was the fun part we had to make a three piece sketch on how we wanted the questions to work. (included in the pictures)

In the afternoon we had to make the whole storyboard where we created the final event with marketing together.
Thursday was the most exciting day, we were finally creating the actual prototype. In our case this was an app. An amazing app to create a prototype is this: Marvel app. You can create different screenshots of a laptop or phone. (included in the pictures)

On Friday we showed the prototype to new high school students. Their opinions were divided some liked it some did not. In the afternoon we had to present our ideas, overall my group had the best presentation and idea! We are still finalizing the end product, but for that moment the teacher told us she could see this happening in Paris and London! Most students from the university were surprised that we were using this idea only for High School students, because they would love to participate as well!

If you are really interested in this theory, please read the book: Sprint – Jake Knapp!

***** Okay so that was one really long week, but a great way to start my studies! The studies are really interesting here, but of course the parties are great as well! Let me put the biggest parties and school related fun days, that I had the past three weeks, in a small list:

Vierumäki – recreation day for the new students
Vierumäki is a beautiful place where students that study leisure and sports go. They have everything regarding sports, they even have an ice rink where one person out of the only eight people that understand the real rules of curling lives. The ice hockey Olympics are sometimes even held here. (We could not get in because the Japanese ice hockey team was training.) Great day, with so many different sports! Although, there is one thing that bothers me, in America I had the same thing. People do not seem to know what field hockey is, and I do not understand why. Field hockey is was a substitute for ice hockey, since they did not have rinks back in the day in summer. (Rant over)

Day in old town – Porvoo tour
Porvoo is the city I currently live in, it has a history of an almost always burning city. Maybe you have noticed from pictures that most houses are red. Pictures are included in this blog. Since the city did not have that much money, they made the houses from wood. Nevertheless, they wanted to seem rich. This is where the red comes in: the red made the wooden houses look like brick houses, because bricks are red! There are even some houses in old town where you see windows painted on the outside where a window should be. Because glasses were really expensive.

Mythology party – Freshmen party
Maybe you have seen some awesome Viking pictures on your Facebook, well this was that day! We had to do many tasks in Helsinki to gain points. It was from two till eight in the freezing cold rain. Nevertheless, afterwards was a really big party, in a crazy big night club! The club had three stories, a karaoke bar, one main stage, a huge terrace (with glass ceiling), and somewhere upstairs where I did not go.


The Grand opening – opening of this school year
A very fancy evening, where everybody had to be dressed up. I was not ready for this. Nobody told me that when you go to a cold country that you need a dress and tights. Fortunately I live with 36 exchange students in one flat (mostly girls). There is one bar in Porvoo which is called La Fiesta, not a good club, but when you have great friends, any club is fun!

Some birthday parties of exchange students here and there
All house parties! We play werewolf, and a lot of card games! We start speaking each other’s language, it is always a lot of fun.

Nature Wellness day
Finland and it’s nature, I am not sure if I have told you this before but: wow. You can walk out of your door and you see forest, yes, but when you particularly search for the good spots, you will be amazed every time.

There are so many more things I still want to do this semester, but there is also always a part of me that is missing my Dutch habits. Finnish people do not have ‘Hagelslag’ nor do they have ‘pepernoten’. If somebody feels the need to send me a Dutch survival package, contact me and I will send you my address (This is especially addressed to my parents and boyfriend  you know who you are)


Oh btw, yeah tomorrow I start working again, I still have this job at home which I can do in Finland. Because it is not all rainbows, butterflies and sunshine (whatever the saying might be). However, I guess I could start a ‘Go Fund Me’ page but that seems a bit over the top.

I hope you enjoyed my blog, like I warned you before, I am not good with keeping up a blog. But I guess this is my second blog, finally.

Thank you for reading,
Moimoi, Lauren Knol