Mika from Wolt & design internships
On Tuesday I met Mika Matilainen from Wolt. He is one of the founders and a leading designer there.
Mika had a really good goal. How to level up the design thinking of young designers?
Design in our conversation meant roughly UX and service design, and all the directions design is expanding from these two. Eg, Mika talked about audio interfaces and business models related to that.
To pick one of his many insights: Mika had noticed that a good designer understand the larger context in which her/his design fits in. In practice, what is the business? What is the actual problem/desire the user/customer has? How to address the broader problem in the first place?
For Aalto students, Mika suggested a rough internship model. Wolt (and other companies) could offer a few week period for selected students to take part in the actual business. To learn all the tacit knowledge of how things are done in practice. Long story short: we decided to sketch a prototype model and try it out. Hopefully early 2019.
All in all. This emphasized my view that there is a clear demand for re-thinking design and the knowledge required to be designer.

