Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

The invitation to the Nokia Idea Generation Workshop came in some time ago and I have now full confirmation as well as a list of other attendees for the event. The general idea is to generate ideas for future mobile products with a timeframe of several years out. With the development of a new phone taking something like 3 years, it has to be a few years out of course.

Up till now I am wonderfully cared for and all things are settled for a wonderful two days with some really great people. Sadly I will not be able to blog about the contents but can blog about everything around and who is there. That list alone will tell you that it will be ahrd for the event not to turn out great.

Mika Röykkee is one of their Nokia senior usability people coming from the S60 team and moving to the next generation products. Udo Szabo is senior product manager on the Ovi team. Urpo (Upi) Nokkonen is hardware designer and I seem to have to thank him for the N95 :). Joeske Schellen is designer at Nokia focussing on wearable electronics. Damian Dinning seems to be the oversight man in concepting and planning and is largely focussing on the imaging part of it all. Sami Oinonen is in the innovation acceleration team and is responsible for co-creation activities so I seem to have to thank him for the event (and probably charlie for the invitation ;)). Laura Richards is one of their category and consumer understanding people (buy does Nokia have cool department names ;)) and Jarkko Kaislasaari is a product manager that worked on the N95. Of course we can’t leave out marketing, so Eri Kuwabara is there too. But actually we all do not need to be there because Timo Veikkola is there, and he is Senior Future Specialist, systematically analyzing the world to spot trends … Our facilitator is Scott Hirsch who seems to have worked on some interesting things.

All in all, this alone gives a great Nokia base to the meeting that will make sure that we have some very productive two days.

But who got invited? Interesting list to say the least. Dave Green is out gaming guy who also runs Snackspot, what a cool blog. Christopher Macintosh Morrison is one of the marketing people, having sold the first digital only marketing agency in London to WPP and now has a new one among others doing marketing for mobile social networks. And Mac, once you get the fire eagle beta login I’d love an invite Vilhelm Sjostrom was Strategic Director at Agency FWD in Helsinki and has turned pro Photographer. Matt Brown is interaction designer at last.fm, which means lots to learn on that front. Thayer Driver was developer at UpMyStreet, which might lead to interesting discussions to what we are doing, and is focussed on social media, gaming and web 2.0. Dietmar Müllser is part of the ISO digital photography committee, tests cameras and knows digital. Jim Griffin is the guy holding the talks about the future of music and entertainment delivery it seems. Sascha Pohflepp studying design interactions and is part of the people behind We Make Money Not Art. Rafe Blandford runs All About Symbian. Matt Hunter is Partner at IDEO and I found a fun video about where digital cameras are going. He is also a drummer, like I am, and not playing, because of a sun, like I am Sami Köykkä is a digital services consultant, speaker and author from what I could find, and Moritz Waldemeyer seems to be another interactions designer type of guy that actually seems to have an iPhone based on his blog.

I actually just posted a video on Seesmic to ask the question what you think the future phone should look like. Just to possibly get a bit of feedback.