Nordic Rebels
When I moved to Finland for my master’s degree, I did so to re-connect with my core reasons for being a designer and channel my skills into something that can make a difference. That is what led me to meeting Miikka and becoming one of the co-founders of Nordic Rebels. This is my first foray into what can only be deemed as, education design, and this movement is something that I hope to continue working with for a long time to come.
We, at the Nordic Rebels movement, are aiming to redefine education and learning, or “goosebump-ify” it. We do this by blending disciplines, technologies and teaching patterns to allow learners to reclaim ownership of their learning. In addition, we’re offering a lot of our content for free, as part of a Creative Commons license, for anyone to access and be inspired by. as an open template for anyone to pick up and use to learn or tackle wicked design challenges.
It’s clear that our efforts have resonated with a broader audience as we were invited to showcase our work at SXSW-EDU in 2019 and were also the proud recipients of the Danish Design Award for Better Learning!
More about Nordic Rebels
Work Examples
What started off as a single course as part of Aalto’s IDBM program is now a startup with multiple course and service offerings. My work on the startup side of things involves all the tasks that keep entrepreneurs busy, ranging from doing financial projections to applying for funding, and also approaching potential clients for sales. The work described below features some of the design related activities that have been a part of my Nordic Rebels journey from the very beginning.
Designing Educational Experiences
As a core team of designers, we practice what we preach, so we use our design skills and methods to craft every element of the learner experience. We take our learnings from previous iterations of the courses delivered and enhance every aspect based on student feedback and our own findings.
We apply methods from service design, such as the service blueprint you see in the image, as well as research and feedback methods from design research.
Integrating Emerging Technologies
We are always on the lookout to take the learner experience to the next level by incorporating emerging tech that can enhance the learning process. For example, for our 2018 course, we collaborated with a Finnish VR Company, to customize their VR collaboration and prototyping workspace for our course.
The goal was to enable students to visualize, plan and organize the final event for the course this year. While the overall outcome was not as successful as we hoped, we learned a lot from it and will be iterating to make this better for the next time the course is offered.
Curating the Website and Design Resources
The Nordic Rebels website was designed and continues to be maintained by me. It features our services as well as our content. In addition, a locked section is intended to be the digital companion to one of our physical courses which videos that supplement the in class experience, as well as daily activities to further aid the learning process.
In addition to the work done to create the website, my work also involves curating design resources. Once completed, this page on the Nordic Rebels website will provide a regularly updated home that showcase the best tools, articles, books, videos and podcasts around design.
