Our project has started for over 1 month and our hardworking results in tons of ideas. I hope you guys follow our blog and give us your comments.
Check our youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/LiveSmarterDemola?feature=watch

We have some time-lapsed videos about how we work together. It is very fresh and amazing while working in the open and spontaneous workspace of Demola New Factory. Besides, our group members also attended in some related workshops about Value Creation, Design Workshop or Productification. All of these activities enrich our personal working skill for a cross-disciplinary project. 

 

The Mid-pitch is coming soon, so now is our LOGO!

One week after the Easter holiday, on 10th April, the mid-pitch will be held in Demola New Factory. Hope you guys can join and support our team. We still keep working through internet during Easter. There you can find us very outstanding with the strong message: Let's live smarter!

Finally, we have a logo for our project and then our team T-shirt < the size and colour are still in the progress>. Hopefully, this logo and branding strategy are also included in our business plan how to make people familiar with the concept of smart living.

Give me feedback about the logo and T-shirts. Follow us. We will update our works onward.

Our logo: LIVESMARTER in multi-faceted shapes. It reflects the complexity of the term "Smart living" or "Digital living". The blue colour is derived from the identity of YIT logo.
And now, the T-shirt : White colour?
Front
Back
I think the black colour is almost our final choice
Front
Back
- Chau -
 
What, where, when: Project plan review meeting, Demola, Wednesday the 27th
On the blog today: The fruits of our labor so far and how YIT felt about them!

Picture
On Wednesday morning me, Chau, Tomas and Kamil met in Demola at about 9.30 to prepare for the project plan review meeting. Somewhere around 10 our facilitator Janne welcomed us to the meeting room, where we greeted our teachers, Timo Poranen from UTA and Marko Seppänen from TUT. Soon after we met, for the first time in person, Juha Kostiainen from YIT.
I was quite nervous and excited to begin the meeting, and found out afterwards I wasn't the only one - I'm glad Janne is always so relaxed, it really lightens up the mood!

The meeting itself went very well in my opinion. We got exactly the kind of feedback we needed. It was encouraging yet instructive. I feel we got a good idea of how the client feels about our ideas. Juha also gave us some valuable tips on his thoughts about in which direction we should aim with the ideas.

We were encouraged to think about the social value and think of more completely new concepts. I'm feeling confident that we can do it. Janne and our teachers also gave us some valuable feedback, and based on their comments we decided to start making more detailed backlogs of our meetings.
Picture
On our team meeting after the project plan review meeting we discussed our pesonal and overall goals of the project - what the project is going to be in the end and what will make it succesfull. Because of the morning meeting we were now able to discuss the next steps of the project.

Timo Poranen helped us quite a bit by providing us with a licence to Balsamiq - a cool tool on interface design. Can't wait to see what we'll make with it - you'll see it on the blog later! After the official team meeting me and Tomas stayed for a while to start with the design on a more traditional (or not) manner. These tables are so darn handy!

Picture
The mid-pitch will be quite a task for us because of the holidays. We do however have some nice ideas for that, too. Janne already helped us by providing us with hundreds of pieces of Legos. You'll definitely want to see what we'll come up with! Here's a little teaser in the form of a picture.

Working hours: Adnan 4, so far 23 | Anni 8, so far 36 | Chau 3, so far 30 | Kamil 18,5, so far 49 |Tomas 18, so far 38,5.

Anni

 
What, where, when:
Building stuff out of playdough in the Demola premises, Thursday the 21st.
On the blog today: Playdough, desperate search for value creation and cool pics!
Another meeting at Demola, this time the whole team present. Adnan had prepared some graphs on cost effectiness, value, and benefits for the customers based on our online mindmap.


 
On Tuesday March 12th we had a Pitching event in Demola New Factory. To squeeze your project into a one-minute presentation took surprisingly much preparing. In the video you can see how Tomas managed to do that. To clarify the mumbling, the pitch is also in text format below the video. All pitches followed the NABC-model (=Need, Approach, Benefit, Competition).

The Pitch

Suppose you were selling your stupid apartment. I wouldn't buy it!   

Why, because I want a house that is more secure to my family, more eco-efficient and that helps me and my neighbours to become a community.  

We will design a home with sensors that keep track off the energy consumption, the healthyness of the structures and it provides security. Those are combined with a networking interface for you and your neighbors.

Then, you can save money and be social and feel secure.

The challenge in smart housing is changing peoples mind sets from traditional housing. Our solution will make this mainstream and when it is implemented in your house, I would like to buy it, but you wouldn't like to sell it anymore.  

Please share your thoughts about smart housing for example by commenting this blog entry. Thank you.

Tomas.
 
Where, when, what:
Demola premises, Thursday the 14th, meeting and megalomaniac ideas!
On the blog today the results of our meeting: discussing the first pitch, the mid-pitch, quality issues, some brainstorming and a not-so-traditional questionnaire.
Picture
Another meeting with the team.  On a Thursday morning we sat comfortably around our soon-to-be regular table at Demola, and had the second official team meeting. The burning subject was of course the pitch last Tuesday - on which we congratulated Tomas (a post on the pitch coming soon - along with some footage on-scene!).

The first pitch may be over, but the mid-pitch keeps getting closer and closer, and that was one of the main topics of the meeting. We decided to go with, as Kamil expressed it in the meeting report: "a flashy mid-pitch with some nice and catchy call-for-action". We've got some cool ideas to charm the audience with, but that's a matter for a whole another blog entry.

Picture
Chau came up with an idea that has been succesfully used in Chicago, San Jose, Memphis and New York based on the easiness of post-its! The fashion of the questionnaire is easy to approach for a person who has something to say about the matter but wouldn't necessarily fill out a traditional on paper printed questionnaire. Also I think we can get some information from the right audience for our project using this way of polling. How would you react to a poll like this?
Picture credit and more information: http://www.giveaminute.info/

Along with other things, we discussed some publicity and contact matters. We talked a little about the blog and the level of officiality we aim for, and decided to set up a Youtube account for the pitches and other videos. Contact with the project partner will be vital before the mid-pitch, and we're looking forward to it, especially after the brainstorming today, I really have the feeling we're on to something here.

- Anni
 
Picture
Finally - the initial meeting with the partner! After some technical diffiulties and some problems with noise (and some strange bus-related incidents of my own) we were able to hold the meeting, which turned out just as informative as I had hoped for. The meeting was held in the Demola and Protomo premises in New Factory, which provided us a nice setting to have a meeting of our own after the initial one with the client.

Although it would have been nice to meet in person, we were able to ask all the relevant questions and get the information needed to establish our ideas further and get new ones. What surprised me - and what still keeps me pondering - is that as digital living we are supposed not to only think about apartments but apartment buildings and areas as a whole. We should also pay attention to the business models behind the soon-to-be innovations, and think about how to offer these ideas to the customer. It certainly seems more clear as to what our roles in the project are, since there are a lot of different talents in the team. (Also, what Janne said in the value creation workshop on Wednesday - the client is using Demola not for old ideas taught to us in school, but for some new ones).

Our focus group on the project will be young people living in Finland. We already had a short conversation about how Finns are as neighbours and as parts of communities. Adnan had some pretty interesting views on the differences, and afterwards as I thought about the matter I thought it's quite good to have people with different cultural backgrounds in the team - it can really be an eye-opener in a project that requires thinking outside the box.

So, what is expected of us is an idea of a concept. The group had some interesting ideas about how to make a demo out of the concept.. We'll be back with more later! What striked us intriguing while discussing the matters after the initial meeting was that the client does not yet provide an efficient way of communication with the customers (online). I think this would sound like a job for us, and I also agree that this would be a service appreciated by the older customers.

At the end of the meeting we made a to-do-list for every team member. This way we'll be ready for the pitch on Tuesday and done with the project plan AND we'll have a hazy idea of what we're going to talk about during the next meeting. Things are getting more complicated; there's the facebook page, e-mail, weebly blog (which seems really nice, thanks for the recommendation and creating it, Chau!), a mind-mapping tool and google docs, of and Doodle of course, phew..! I'm getting a feeling I'm forgetting something.

Anni

Digital Living Demola 2013