NWF Team

Yuliya Nesterenko | Demola facilitator

It has been an exciting journey to facilitate “Next Wooden Furniture” project. Being an independent observer of the team’s progress, I have witnessed how much hard-work, creativity and artistic thinking they put into the fi nal designs. I believe that the diversity of the team has brought their thinking to a totally different level. Together we managed to co-create, brainstorm and innovate something extremely futuristic within such a traditional industry.

Volha Furs | Project manager

Participation in Demola Autumn 2016 defi nitely was my breakthrough in the innovative management. Working with a real company was fascinating, challenging and inspiring experience. My role as a project manager was to communicate with the steakholders, ask questions, clarifying assumptions and vague statements, keep team members informed about stages of the product development and events related to the project, make sure that the dialogue with the project partner was constructive and everyone have an opportunity to give their opinion and concerns.

Raul Garcia | Designer

The experience of being a designer of wooden furniture products and working as a team with other people from different countries was amazing for me. I developed my skills with some rendering softwares and I’ve started to use new ones. This experience was also good because it’s like working for a real company, something completely different to my university design courses. For me the testing afternoons and the pitching events were really useful for my personal growth and also for the project progress.

Victor Garcia | Desginer

When I joined the project my expectations were to work in something related with my studies. Now, the result is completely different: I had never worked before in a project related to the design of a physical product. Therefore, it was the opportunity to work in the whole process of creating wooden furniture, in a very diversifi ed team with people of different countries and backgrounds. The project gave me the possibility to improve my team-working skills and also, to improve myself and the way I think. This experience is going to be an infl ection point in my personal and professional life.

Etienne Allgeyer | Designer

During this project I learned a lot about working in a multidisciplinary team which consists of people from a lot of different countries. Also it’s the fi rst time I have ever worked with a real project partner. It was very useful to see where my strengths are and how I can apply them to my team to give them benefi ts through my skills. This concept of Demola was very new for me and it was nice to be a part of this big group full of nice, skillful and motivated people.

Mariana Maksymowych | Designer

This project has been an amazing experience for me working within an international team based culture. Designing a piece of wooden furniture and working with a project partner was completely new to me, which allowed me to develop and learn new skills in communication and design. I’m glad that I got the opportunity to be a part of Demola. The facilitators were always helpful and pushed our creative minds when it came to our projects. For me the Jam sessions were very useful in terms of boosting my confidence.

Rutger Blom | Desginer

Working on this project has in many ways been quite eye-opening. Like many of the others, the whole Demola concept was new to me. I learned that developing new product ideas for a project partner takes a lot of brainstorming and going back and forth between concepts; there rarely is a clear path visible towards the end product. Especially towards the end of the development. When I did get involved it was very pleasant to work with the team. I think everybody shared very similar visions, which made discussing a lot easier. I’m happy to have worked together with everyone.