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From Crisis to Creativity at the Global Specialty Coffee Market

We all know that the Covid-19 pandemic has affected many businesses globally and locally. When lockdowns and government restrictions were put in place, especially the food and beverage entrepreneurs globally needed to act quickly and find creative ways to survive the crisis.

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Erika PerttunenFrom Crisis to Creativity at the Global Specialty Coffee Market
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Can you transfer empathy? 

Gaining a deep understanding of users has become important in technology development, helping designers provide useful and successful solutions for the users.  Even though many methods developed for empathic design emphasize direct contact with the user, it is seldom efficient for the whole development team to meet the user.
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adminCan you transfer empathy? 
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Catching emotions

A newborn begins to cry, inducing her neonatal neighbors to join in an ensemble of high pitch cries. A few years later, that child runs to hug her classmate in pain. As a teenager, she enjoys hanging out with her friends. Sometimes she laughs with them, even though she is not sure what they are laughing about. A few years later, this teen is a professional designer interviewing a user for the first time. Her colleagues say she is good at building an “emotional connection” with her clients. She cannot tell for sure why, but she feels she connects with the emotions of others and can sometimes experience on her flesh the sensations and feelings described by someone else.

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adminCatching emotions
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Pressing COVID-19 pandemic: an acid test of creativity in the food and beverage industry

Product development is a team sport in small food and beverage companies, requiring creative collaboration efforts between entrepreneurs and their stakeholders. As the epidemic continues to stir the marketplace and ways of working, rapidly created novel and rebranded products, sales channels and market positioning are emerging in response to the  ongoing crisis.

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Maria MikkonenPressing COVID-19 pandemic: an acid test of creativity in the food and beverage industry
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WHAT DOES RESEARCH SAY ABOUT EDUCATING USERS ON NEW PRODUCTS?

For any new product to succeed, customers need to adopt it as part of their consumption habits. Food products represent specific types of consumer products in their high frequency of consumption, physiological function, actual ingestion of the product and socially embedded nature of food-related behavior, all of these adding up to the challenge of new product adoption. How to then enhance customer acceptance of new food products?

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Erika PerttunenWHAT DOES RESEARCH SAY ABOUT EDUCATING USERS ON NEW PRODUCTS?
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From growth to responsibility: Changing conversations in Silicon Valley – excerpt from book ‘Design+ Organizational renewal and innovation through design’

With the rising complexity and reach of technology, the work of designers can have global consequences. We need to be open to talking about the dark side of design and prepare for some difficult discussions on responsibility and who do designs include, exclude and advocate for.

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Erika PerttunenFrom growth to responsibility: Changing conversations in Silicon Valley – excerpt from book ‘Design+ Organizational renewal and innovation through design’
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The evolution of empathy

Empathy is part of our everyday life. Empathy allows us to understand others and to feel the joys and sorrows of fictional movie characters as if they were real. Empathic understanding helps us to recognize the needs of other people and can even lead to extreme forms of unselfish behavior. People have even donated their kidney to an unknown person without expecting anything in return. Where does this remarkable ability originate? Often, it’s said that only humans can feel empathy. But what should we think, for example, about birds that show characteristics of empathy or unselfish behavior among single-celled organisms?

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adminThe evolution of empathy
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INSIGHTS AND IMPRESSIONS FROM VEGEMESSUT

What will be the next big plant-based protein? Will insect food make a second coming? What is this fermentation thing that everybody seems to be talking about? Is veganism merely a fad or is it here to stay? The DesignBites research team spent last Friday at Vegemessut getting insights and perspectives on the Finnish food and beverage scene.

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Erika PerttunenINSIGHTS AND IMPRESSIONS FROM VEGEMESSUT