Our commitment to working with the industry has been well established since the beginning of the Sandbox program. With every passing semester, we are filling up our partner wall.

To the end of working more closely with the industry, one of our course offerings is Digital Product Management Industry Project (DPMIP). The course is designed to provide a real-world setting for the students to practice their Design Thinking and Product Management skills.

As a quick summary here is a timeline of how the course works.

1. The Sandbox partners with companies
2. Problem statements for students are

Design Factory Global Network (DFGN) is a network of innovation hubs in universities and research organisations in five continents of the world. DFGN is on a mission to create change in the world of learning and research through passion-based culture and effective problem solving. Shared understanding and common ways of working enable Design Factories in the network to collaborate efficiently across cultures, time zones and organisational boundaries fostering radical innovations.
- DFGN website

DFGN currently has 35 member organizations as of December 2021. Sandbox is a proud member of the network since 2018. We actively participate in the community-building efforts

For the third time Sandbox Toolbox is bringing Figma101 & Elmo Soomets to the stage! Figma is a web-based graphics editing and user interface design app. You can use it to do all kinds of graphic design work from wireframing websites, designing mobile app interfaces, prototyping designs, crafting social media posts, and everything in between.

Things you need for the workshop: Figma account

Elmo Soomets is the Design Team Lead @lab.mobi. He uses Figma on a daily basis and is going to share his know-how and experience with us.

Where: @Zoom
When: 7.12.2021, 16:00-18:00

Registration

What do Pipedrive, Velvet and Sandbox have in common?

Pipedrive, a Unicorn company, has a very successful sales platform for businesses to use. Velvet is Estonia’s best design company. Whereas the Sandbox is part of the University of Tartu, Institute of Computer Science. So, on the surface not much!

But as they say, the devil is in the details. In our case it’s also quite easy to guess, since Sandbox is all about Design Thinking. So if you guessed that Design Thinking is used in all these places you’d be right. But read on to find out

This time we'll focus on defining the (right!) problems.

Before we start prototyping and testing our product we should understand and be able to articulate clearly the "What" and the "Why". How to narrow down to the core problem and choose well-defined goals with tools and methods like user personas, jobs to be done (JTBD), and design briefs.

Raik Ilves is a creative technologist with experience in blending design, technology, and strategy. Over the years he has worked as a specialist on various parts of the digital project lifecycle – UI/UX design, project management, coding, and technical leadership. Currently is

The Sandbox Toolbox is a series of events that we host once a month at our Sandbox space to provide hands-on experience about different topics related to digital product management.

The story of how this series began is quite interesting, and it starts with an awesome guest lecturer, Elmo Soomets from Mobi Lab. The Delta building was newly unveiled and we had our awesome new space. This was when the pandemic and the lockdowns hit us and no one was able to access the space. In came Elmo with a suggestion that he would like to teach the students more

Toolbox is back! This time we'll focus on UX writing.

What is UX Writing? Why is it important? How to write the copy for UX?

These are the questions Maria Reile will give an answer to.Maria Reile is a writing enthusiast who loves languages, enjoys writing various types of texts, is very fond of research, and just can’t wait for those few precious hours of free time to open another well-written book. She has a PhD in general linguistics and is currently working as a Research fellow in experimental pragmatics at the University of Tartu as well as

Course: Digital Product Management Industry Project
Team: Mait, Sandra, Mario, Maria, Uko
Semester: Spring 2021

The challenge: Explore what possibilities are there to use natural language processing (NLP) technology in Pipedrive’s customer relation manager software to create additional value to their customers.

Team Pipedrive worked out a mobile friendly feature that uses NLP technology to read, interpret, categorize and react accordingly to emails.

Course: Digital Product Management Industry Project
Team: Maria, Tobechi Michael, Mariam, Emilia, Norman
Semester: Spring 2021

The challenge: Redesign an in-house spreadsheet-based software access rights system.

Team Arvato proposed a role-based solution that is intuitive and easy, includes predefined software packages, simple add/remove features and change history export options.

In order to explain what design thinking is we could define it like the textbook does, as a highly user-centric process of solving problems. And continuing on and on about all the different aspects to it. There already are great articles (here and here) and even books which cover the topic in detail. So instead of re-inventing the wheel, we will look at the story of the OXO Good Grips Vegetable Peeler with the design thinking lens. This is the story about how one company transformed a boring everyday object into something iconic with good design. Their design is so