Who are you and where do you come from?
My name is Miemo Penttinen, I’m a UX designer and photographer from Helsinki, Finland. I used to work as a design director in one of the oldest digital agencies here in Finland, but I’ve gone freelance lately for a change. Recently I’ve also started to venture much more into graphic design and web&mobile development as a part of my role in a startup creating a new kind of social hyperlocal media. Check out http://miemo.net for more about me and http://bornlocal.fi about our startup.
Share your twitter account with us and tell us what you are twittering about:
On my personal Twitter account @miemo I usually tweet about my daily thoughts & findings about all the things that interest me from latest gadgets & apps to design tips and current news etc (mostly in English, sometimes also in Finnish if the topics are local). For @createandrotate I was planning to dig also little deeper into my sources of inspiration – present some of my all-time-favorites from various fields. But I’ll probably also tweet about RIghtNow-topics too.
Tell us about your creative side:
As a designer I always want to create something that is purposeful and meaningful for the people on a deeper level, not just something that looks&feels good. Digital media is my native environment, and I love how it’s become much more intimate and closer to people’s daily lives in recent years with the post-PC world. I feel there’s still much to be done in creating services and apps that don’t just waste people’s time but provide real value to their lives.
As a photographer I’m trying to capture some specific mood or atmosphere of a place, an object or a person. I’m a sort of documentarist in a sense that I don’t do much preplanning for the shoots, but at the same time I’m not very interested in creating an objective documentary of the subject but rather my own interpretation based on how I felt there & then.What inspires you?
For general inspiration & creativity boosts I tend to draw from those art forms that I don’t personally work with directly: cinema, music, architecture, industrial design, painting, … I guess there’s a bit more magic & fascination in the art if you’re not fully immersed into the craft of it.
Of course if I’m trying to tackle some specific design challenge, then I’ll look more closely into that field and what has been done before, but I find that’s more of a learning process than about inspiration as such.Time travel: Where would you go to?
Mid 1960s, and most specifically USA of that time – amazingly creative time&place in culture, technology & politics. I love the modernistic style from that era in architecture, painting, typography, advertising, product design, music and the overall feeling of the era of changing the world together for the better.
Name your favorite present book:
From fiction the most memorable reading experience in recent years has been „Kafka on the shore“ by Haruki Murakami. A fascinatingly weird book! I’m currently reading Murakami’s massive „1Q84“ which also seems to be interestingly off-angle with the real world.
Which tweeter would you recommend for @createandrotate and why?
You should ask @HenrikRydberg – he’s deeply involved in the next (or should I say current?) hot topic in design, 3D printing, on top of being a top-notch UX-designer and a design teacher.
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