Our team part 4: Kaisa

Hi everyone! I’m Kaisa, 25 years old and I study energy and environmental things. I’m a country girl, well at least I was born and raised in a farm in a small city of Huittinen. I still feel more of a country girl than a city girl even though now I live in the city of Pori. I travel to Tampere to school and back few times a week. I am an outdoor person and I have just lately discovered hiking and geocatching. During this fall, I have been hiking few trips and planning already a new hiking trip. The picture of me is from Koli national park which was a great place, even though a bit foggy… I also spend every summer and autumn a lot of time in the forests picking berries and mushrooms which I use to my other hobby, baking. During my free time, I also go to the gym and jogging.

I applied to this Smart Waste Flow project because the subject is interesting and I wish to work with this kind of problems also in the future. Clean technologies, such as biomass and solar, and green thinking overall is something that I’m really interested in. I also have some work experience in resource wisdom so I can apply that a bit in this project.

- Kaisa -

Changes ahead

During the week 42 our team experienced its first setback of the project. Until now we had been developing a website for small and medium size companies. The initial idea of was to create a website for companies where they could sell and buy reusable leftover materials and these materials would not become waste.

Our project partner Saara had to inform us that the current idea wasn't good enough for Pirkanmaan Jätehuolto. Saara had discussed the idea with the development team of Pirkanmaan Jätehuolto and the team was convinced that we shouldn’t develop our idea further to make it work better for the company. 

For a Demola project is it not uncommon that ideas do not work. In the process we create ideas and test them and if the ideas do not work, we have to develop new ones. For our team it was a small shock to hear that we have to start again with a completely new idea but it is important to remember that you can't fall in love with your idea because it might not work for the project company.

On 25^th of October we had a meeting at the office of Pirkanmaan Jätehuolto. We met Saara and other employees of the company. During the meeting we came up with new guidelines for the project. Many factors were changed: from now on we should focus only on on-site recycling and we should try to find out why people do not separate their waste. What could motivate people to separate the waste? Instead of focusing on small and medium size companies, we have to focus on households and municipal companies.

The group during the meeting. 

Our team was quite satisfied with the meeting and we now have a better and more concrete picture of what we have to create for the company. It was a shame that we heard the bad news in the middle of October but we still have time to restart the project with a new idea.  During the first part of the project our knowledge of waste business has increased and we can use the gained knowledge to create a better solution.

- Henriikka -

Our team part 3: Simone

So, my name is Simone, I am 27 years old and I am from Vienna, Austria. I am doing my exchange semester here in Tampere and I am studying international business at TAMK but in my home country I study management for SME.

I love Finland because of the wonderful nature, the good education system and I also like the finnish mentality.

In my freetime I like to play the flute, go for some hiking trips and meet friends and family. Yoga is also a very important part in my life as I try to live in a minimalist way.

I heard about Demola in the orientation week at TAMK and I really got interested in this kind of innovation work. I chose the smart waste flow project because waste mangement is an important topic all around the world and especially SME's have a huge need in finding cheap and easy ways to handle their waste properly. So I wanted to join this team to create an innovative solution to keep Finland "green" :)

- Simone -

Our team part 2: Mikko

As a person I’ve always considered myself to be laidback. As mentioned in one of our meetings my spirit animal, the Sloth, might tell something about me. I love great food (as you can see in the picture) and I love music so much that I consider it being kind of a lifeline for me. Outside of schoolwork I’m also an active board member in few of TUT’s clubs which in a way I’ve sometimes considered being a hobby for me.

So I’m a third year student at TUT and I’ve found myself to be working in the Smart Waste Flow Demola-project as the Project Manager. Applying for this project wasn’t a difficult choice since I worked for the project company Pirkanmaan Jätehuolto in the past summer in in one of their landfills. The summer job experience has been really useful in the project so far and I think I will draw ideas from the experience throughout the project.

My road to study environmental engineering at TUT hasn’t been the most straightforward. I was born and raised in the windy city of Lahti. After high school and a year of service in the army I moved from Lahti, the Chicago of Finland, to Jyväskylä aka the Athens of Finland to study physics at the University of Jyväskylä. Studying pure physics for little over a year made me realize that I might like more the technical side of things - so in 2013 I found myself in Tampere, the Manchester of Finland, studying automation technology at Tampere University of Technology.

The summer before I began at TUT I worked as a garbage truck driver. The salary was quite good and so as few of my friends also had a little extra in their pocket we decided to go backpacking around South-East Asia and Tanzania. Throughout the experiences I had travelling and working as a garbage man I found out that the World could need some problems solvers in the environmental field. So, as I was sitting on a heap of plastic bottles that had been washed away on the shore on a small island in the coast of Tanzania, I filled out the program exchange application to study environmental engineering. From that point on I’ve been eager to find out new solutions in the way we handle our waste.

- Mikko -

Our team part 1: Aili

I'm the newest member to our group and I joined the team a bit later than the others. However, I'm very excited to be part of the project! I am an exchange student from the United States and go to university in northern Minnesota. I'm outdoorsy and love to escape to nature. I enjoy being in the woods or on a lake doing different activities such as mountain biking, hiking, sailing, running, photography, etc. I like to be creative and work with my hands, knitting, woodworking, doodling, and pottery.

I study Environmental Studies with an emphasis in Industrial Ecology. I'm very passionate about the environment and is why I decided to go to university to study Environmental Studies. I want to be involved in my community and work to make it more environmentally responsible. Working on this project with the team is a great opportunity to use knowledge from my studies in a practical way. I'm interested in learning new things and by working on the project I will be introduced to a variety of new challenges.

- Aili - 

The Playbook Meeting

The purpose of the Playbook meeting on Friday 7.10.2016 was to in a way get updated on our progress of the project and how our Playbook has been updated. We got our whole team, our facilitator Ohad and Saara from Pirkanmaan Jätehuolto Oy to attend the meeting which was a great thing so that we got everybody’s opinions and ideas on the board! We didn’t go through the playbook by just browsing it, instead Ohad gave us a large paper which had kind of the headlines of the playbook written on it.

Idea was to use the paper as a tool where we added our ideas with post-it notes. First we added our end users to the segment section on the paper. Our end users are mostly SMEs and private people but we also opened what kind of SMEs and private people (e.g. factories, machine industry companies, students, artists and so on). Keeping our end users in mind we were supposed to reflect ideas to what kind of needs our end user has considering their waste management to the needs section. After we got all the needs we were supposed to think about what is our approach to the need and how it benefits the end user. In addition we also added our competition and the advantage of our idea over the competition to the paper.

After this every section had something in it except the resources section. Now we had to find out what kind of resources we needed to execute our idea. We got a bunch of resources we need on the paper but I think our team felt confident about gathering all the needed resources. For me this was the first time I realized that we have the abilities to make something concrete and functional out of this project!

Now the paper was full of ideas and we took the picture above. Before the meeting was over we had a little chat with the Demola Network Campaign Manager Janne Eskola about new cooperation of Demola and the city of Tampere. Basically he just informed us that Demola will give info to the city about what kind of projects are going on at Demola and in return all the Demola teams can ask for info or help if they find that the city of Tampere has something that they could offer the teams.

- Mikko -

#1 Testing Afternoon

Just a few blocks from Demolas New Factory premises there is a place called Monitoimitalo 13 (roughly translated Multifunctional Building 13) which is a place for people of all ages (but mostly younger people) to practice hobbies or just to hang around. Demola folks had set up an event for the people of Monitoimitalo 13 and Demola to get to know what kind of projects are going on Demola right now. Our audience consisted mostly of young people from approximately ages 8 to 16. The idea was that we would present our sh***y prototypes, that we created on Saturday, to the audience and they'd come up with new ideas or criticism about the prototype. Also in the event some of the teams cross-examinated each other and gave feedback about the prototypes and shared ideas.

Our facilitator Ohad explains what's going to happen today.

As the event began we set up our stand and tried to lure some participants of our young audience. For our youngest audience (kids under 10 years old) our project was quite hard to understand. Recycling waste isn't something your average youngster usually bothers to think about let alone recycling the waste of SMEs. Our experience with the younger children can be summarized with the experience that Ane had with one young boy. After explaining the idea of our prototype the kid just answered "I like dancing" and danced away to the next stand. Sooo yeah :)

Our stand and our new team member Aili representing our Sh**ty prototype.

Ane explaining our project and prototype.

It seemed that most of the older kids understood our concept and prototype and thought it sounded cool and thought it might work. We tried to dig up some ideas that they could give us about the prototype but they couldn't find anything new or even something to criticise about. Other teams and facilitators of Demola on the other hand gave us much to think about. In the discussions with the Demola folks we found new ideas, problems and criticism about our prototype. I think those conversations gave us some insight on how to make our concept better. After all I think the first testing afternoon was a success and we managed find new ways and ideas to advance our project.

- Mikko -

JAM #1

The first JAM session was held last Saturday, 1.10.2016. All the teams gathered in Demola at 9.30 for a full day workshop and Our Smart Waste Flow team got luckily extra support from Saara (a member of Pirkanmaan Jätehuolto) for the whole day. The session started with a breakfast and after that at ten o’clock the presentations started with topics like the value propositions and the development process. An interesting example was the “löylykauha” and it was used to demonstrate how the value of an object is divided into attributes. There were also presentations about finding your diamonds and using university assets. After the presentations it was the time for lunch (free!) at the restaurant Frenckell & Piha.

Listening to the presentations.

During the afternoon we got to do some real team working. All of us were divided into groups and as a group we had to develop a prototype with different kind of materials. This prototype should be related to three products which are used in the everyday life and were selected by another team. The aim of this process was to develop a prototype which could be used to explain to other people about the product. Each group had to guess the function of another team's demo. The teams created all different things like a vampire hunting knife, super modern bra and underwear, headphones that chooses the music that fits to your tea, etc. We learned that the demos can be very simple and that they don’t need to work necessary, they are just demos.

After having done this in random groups we had to develop a prototype for our own project with our own team. This last topic in the afternoon was Sh**ty Prototyping. Because right now our group has a service as intended outcome we made a poster which explains the service. In the next phase of the afternoon all teams could pitch their prototype and advice was given. The day ended around half past four with some snacks. All in all the day was successful, fun and we learned to work even better together.

Our team's prototype!

The pitching.

- Kaisa and Ane -