The Sandbox considers itself to be a “Digital Product Management & Design Thinking education hotspot in Tartu”. As of 2022, Sandbox has worked with 13 partner companies, trained several students, conducted numerous hands-on toolbox sessions, is part of the Design Factory Global Network (DFGN) and provides a massive 300m2 creative space for students and partner companies to work in the Delta. The Sandbox space also houses the only fully functional kitchen, complete with an oven, in the building. This is an important detail as you will see later. Given the work that has already been done there is no doubt that it is indeed a Design Thinking hotspot. Now the Sandbox is setting ambitious goals for itself, but before we start sailing away with the winds of hard-work and success we wanted to sit back and cherish the story of how it all started. In other words, this is our origin story.
The story starts when Aalto Design Factory, the first of its kind, was established in 2008 as part of creating Aalto University in Finland. A few years and some key partnerships later the idea of Design Factory Global Network (DFGN) was born (Our post about DFGN). The Aalto DF and DFGN were on the radar of key people connected to the University of Tartu who’d stop by when visiting Finland. Over the years, Aalto DF graciously hosted and shared their ideas with us. In 2017, Aalto DF hosted a Design Factory Bootcamp that Anne, our founder, attended. At the time Anne was putting together a programme for Digital Product Management, and the pieces fell into place. The network provided great collaboration opportunities and a wonderful supportive community. So, it was the logical next step. The next year, in the Spring of 2018, the University of Tartu officially applied to be part of the DFGN with help from the ICS marketing team. Sille-Liis and Mattias helped Anne put together the video that was used to apply to the network. With the acceptance of our application Sandbox was born. Except, it wasn’t called Sandbox when it started, and the Delta building was still on the drawing board.
After being accepted into the DFGN, the Digital Product Management module was piloted in September 2018 in the old premises of the Institute of Computer Science (ICS) on Liivi street. A special shout-out here goes to all the professional specialists from companies like Wise, Pipedrive, MobiLab and Mooncascade who pitched in and gave their input for the programme. Right from helping us create the curricula to giving guest lectures and even leading some of the lectures, we couldn’t have done it without them. At the beginning there wasn’t a dedicated space for the program, but this would soon change. With constant support from Jaak, and Piret at the ICS, we were able to plan a dedicated space for the program in the Delta building. It was also around this time that the program got named Sandbox, after the team brainstormed for ideas using Crazy8, a design thinking method that challenges people to sketch eight distinct and crazy ideas.
Later in late 2019, Maria and Kate joined the Sandbox team, and Annet and Anastasiia from the Industry Collaboration team contributed a lot to spread the spirit of the programme as well. After designing everything from scratch the Sandbox space was officially inaugurated in February 2020. With the inauguration of the space there has been no looking back.
Along the way, plenty of memories and connections were made. Be it our partner wall, or our team wall we take pride in both. Among all of these one anecdote stands out to Anne. In Autumn 2018 the Aalto DF was celebrating its 10th anniversary, and they had special numbered edition of coffee cups up for auction for the occasion. They had #1, #10 and #100. Anne won the auction by promising to throw a pancake party on the rooftop terrace in the winter. Surely enough, the pancake party was organized as promised on 27-Feb-2020. It was the only day during that snowless winter with snow, Anne points out. We were also able to make snow angels on the rooftop terrace that day. We had guests from 5-6 different DFs participating, from as close as Helsinki and Riga to as far as New York. The kitchen came in quite handy in fulfilling Anne’s promise. Now, we use the kitchen to host team breakfasts at the Sandbox among other things.
Later Leo interned with us for one year and Yana joined the team in 2020. Together they built this website in Spring 2021. Maria took over the Sandbox in April 2021 and currently the team is comprised of Maria (aka Sandboss), Anne, Yana, Uku, Tejas and Kristjan. Maria does everything ranging from designing the visuals for Sandbox, to making deals with partners for the program. Maria, Anne, and Yana mentor the courses that we offer at the Sandbox, and Yana takes care of the tech support as well. Uku handles Industry Collaboration and does sales for Sandbox, while Tejas and Kristjan handle Marketing, and Communication.
With Estonia getting its 10th unicorn recently, and the startup ecosystem growing larger every year we believe there is a growing need for digital product managers and design thinking enthusiasts. So as we look out to the future, we believe there are bigger and better things to come for the Sandbox. From working on building a larger Design Thinking community across Estonia to training more students and partnering with more organizations, Sandbox will be working on many exciting things in the times to come.