More than a product

World is changing and products are doing it at the same time. Products are much more than products, are experience, have a simbolic and emotional value apart form the functional one.

Products can also mean a way of life as it happens with sustainable ones. What does sustainable products mean? 

"Sustainable development means doing them in a way that meets our own needs without compromising the ability of our future generations to meet their own ones." But I must all that not only humans have needs, our planet has it own needs as well.

Moreover, every product marketing is defined by the 4Ps: PRODUCT, PRICE, PLACE and PROMOTION.

Suming this two ideas, the issue that the planet has needs and the promotion of the product itself I will conclude saying that all the efforts we put in making a product more ecologically friendly are in vain if we do not know how to communicate this real value to the customer. A costumer which in a certain PLACE and time, will see our PROMOTION, will choose our PRODUCT among the others and will pay the PRICE we is willing to pay.

Consider this:

All the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass grater than that of humans, Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in most every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn´t have a design problem. People do.

Cradle to cradle, William McDonough & Michael Braungart.

Googlestorming

One company. One briefing. Some conditions. A plastic product device which make people move, do sport, increasing it´s customer experience. 

The first step was to investigate, what is innostava suomi doing? what sports are in Finland? Why do they practise them among others?

First what we found out is that among the finnish values there were two we really need to take into account: fun and the sense of community price. Moreover, Innostava Suomi is a company that is also concerned with environmental issues. That´s why they try to be eco-compass events.

About finnish sports, we found out that there are many sports that were done in the past and are still done in the present.

Cross skiing that used to be a way of transport in the cold winters is nowadays a good way of having fun.

 What used to be the only way of visiting neighbours is now the national sport.

The same happens with orienteering which used to be a training exercise in land navigation for military service. For those who like me when I came here don´t know what is it about, orienteering is a sport that requires navigational skills using a map and compass as it´s objective is going from point to point (marked in the map) running.

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Researching more deeply, we found that people practise this sport while child at school, give up as teenagers and practise it again after 30 more or less. Because of this lack we decided to focus our future product in children, the ones who needs to see orienteering as a way of having fun and giving them also a kind of team feeling, so that they dont give up this nature sport to practise soccer or all of the others in which they go propably to became part of a team.

Objetives and research done. Next stop: pencil and sketches.

To be continued...

First steps

Even if in the last entrance I told you that I have been here for a month now I´m gonna do as if I am new here and I would told you little by little how my experience here has been for the last weeks.

Still if in the date it puts that today is the 27th of September, let´s imagine for a while that today is the 9th of September. Helsinki Design week has just started. My first Nordic design experience.

Wood all around. Different ways to assemble, different furniture to create, but all coming from the same finnish forests.

But wood has also a competence with other eco- friendly materials. An example? Cardboard.

Another really nice project was the Smart Puustelli Miinus kitchen, a sustainable kitchen in every detail and also a way to create new networks with more domestic employment opportunities in emerged surrounding regions.

(More info: http://www.puustellimiinus.com/en/puustelli-miinus/ecological)

But everything was not just ecological design, there was space for the social design as well. The company that shows it project is called South of North, a collaboration project between 12 Nordic architecture offices who use their professional skills to decrease poverty in the developing world. Their aim is to achieve positive social impact through design and architecture.

(More info: https://southofnorth.squarespace.com/#southofnorth)

Thursay, 11th of September.

First class in the Design Factory or DF as they call it. It´s fun that they name with just some letters their endless finnish words.

The stage was really nice and color was all around. The natural step was the first one to speak.

"Is good to come back to the basics" they told and they were right because we live in a too technological world and it´s time to go a bit back, an go again to the nature and peaceful world where we all came from and where we always have lived.

They give us some clauses, some problems we have to face, some things that have to change. The fact that we are introducing substances that nature don´t know how to deal with, the lack of the sustainability in economics and politics, and the issue that we are physically inhibiting nature´s cycles, among others.

But as every problem, there´s always a solution: SSSAT.

Success: sustainability as a common objective.

System: Know what ecological and principles we are dealing with.

Strategies: Substitution, reuse, recycle.

Actions: what can we do?

Tools: footprints.

The speech ends with some useful phrases to take into account:

"Begin with the end in mind".

"Look backward with the vision on the present".

The next one to speak was Nokia, who talked about how the phone technology and life at the same time is reinventing. We are living in a connected world where there are no country boarders. However, I think that we have to act local while thinking global.

Then it was time for energy and the wide range of renewable energy sources we have nowadays. The world is changing and the energy is doing it as well because, why to have energy from limiting sources in stead of from the "limitless" natural ones?

All this speeches take place in Contemporary topics and product liability course, but what is it by the way?
Product liability is not only costumer safety, is everything around the product.

It can be explained with the onion layer theory. In the middle is the fact that everything we do impacts the environment. For this reason, there are test and evaluation that measure how big is this effect. Then someone classify them, how many emissions, how many footprints does it have. This footprints and requirement are sum together in some policies, some ISO laws. In the final layer is our responsibility. We choose, we learn. There can be thousands of certificates in products but if the costumer doesn´t look at them or doesn´t care what they talk about all this onion layers explained before are totally nonsense.

Tervetuloa!

First of all present myself, I´m Sara Alonso, a spanish exchange student in Aalto university until December. I ´m studying my last year of Industrial Design and Product Development Engineering in Tecnun (Pamplona university) and I´m proud to say that I will be an Aaltonaut for the following months.

What is Aaltonaut? As long as I have discovered, Aaltonaut is a way of life. Design Factory is their place, a place where every dream is possible as long as it is shared. A place for creativity and fun,  where companies, researchers, students and teachers get along with.

I have been in this country for a month and I´m starting to know how things work and why they work in this way and not another. With my research I ended concluding that as every country, finnish are nowadays what they have had. There´s no bad neither good culture, they are luckily all different. For this reason, one of my objectives while being here is to take with me all the good things you have and hope also to leave here a bit of spain or at least a bit of Sara as well.

Now it´s time to talk about Aalto University, a campus where you can find whatever you can imagine you need without the need of any bus.

 

What do I like most about Finland? Nature. There is nature everywhere around. Nature friendly activities, nature friendly people, nature friendly country.

 

And here is where my blog and its objective starts, in the real house of Nature and the perfect place to learn about it, Aalto.

Aaltonaturably,

Sara.