Hei Nordkapp, I'm Iida!

The storyEmployees visualised their client work through Business Origami, a service design technique that makes fuzzy business systems concrete. I designed the origami boards and props, co-created the visual identity and user story comics with a graphic designer, and facilitated workshops in Finland and the Baltics, in some as our consultancy's only person in the room. The sessions were deliberately mixed-language.

The storyAt the boutique strategy consultancy Noren I led the project with one colleague, owning facilitation and client relations, and conducted eight of the fifteen interviews myself. Alongside them we ran a semiotic benchmark of fifteen brands, coding what each one's imagery promised, so the interviews could be read against what the category was already saying. In the synthesis workshops, founders and store employees listened to anonymised excerpts rather than my summary of them. Hearing the messy reality in a customer's own words helped the founders and staff take ownership of the findings.

The storyFor a three-person team with no researcher, I picked the tooling before I built in it. The team had Google Drive and nothing else, so I moved the practice into Notion: dependencies between records, light automation, free, and fast to work in. Into it went an insight repository with a page per session, consent and pseudonymization protocols, a hypothesis database wired to the backlog, and a budgeted participant pipeline. Then I ran the first cycle: six sessions with seven participants in Finnish and English, four of them mine, working through premise, tone and mechanics in that order from screen flows on a tablet, some of which I had built myself. Recruitment mixed the team's own networks with participants recruited cold from Reddit, screened for a deliberate mix. Alongside it, a Python review-mining pipeline found the same guilt mechanic in six of seven competitor apps. The sessions had shown it too, and the team wrote it into a standing principle.

The storyWith the practice standing, I carried findings from my own interviews the rest of the way myself: a new onboarding sequence that I designed, built with Claude Code, and opened as a pull request. The division of labour was explicit. I directed and reviewed every change, the agent wrote at my pace, and the engineer held the merge. Research is where I expect to spend my time. When the fix is within reach, I would rather build it than describe it. From daily practice I know where trust in an agent is earned, when to take control back, and how errors get caught. What I have not done is sit with someone else while they hand control to an agent. That is the study I want to run next.

The storyNobody had made the disagreement tangible, so I did. My job was not to gather new data but to force the evidence we had, seven competitor briefs, six interviews and the literature, into a shape that made the choice concrete: two axes, every competitor placed on them, the empty region named, then two candidate positions with their costs and their specific ways of failing. A second map in the memo I labelled a structural sketch rather than a benchmark, because nobody in this category publishes outcome data.

The storyWorking white-label as the research engine behind a partner consultancy, I owned the analysis pipeline, synthesis and reporting. Three kinds of evidence met: platform statistics across thirteen months and roughly 750 people, the partner's employee interviews in Finnish and English, and close discourse analysis of seven episodes the numbers flagged, over 400 messages coded one by one. The coding ran on the human-AI workflow from my master's thesis: I set the frame, AI extends the coding across the full dataset, every batch is checked against hand-coded samples, and interpretation stays human.

The storyWe House Meltsi is a community house in Helsinki, run by a startup working to reduce social exclusion among families. As sole researcher I spent three months embedded in the house: a survey I designed and analysed myself, participatory observation, and in-depth interviews with six families, sanity-checked with local social-services professionals. Families whose first language was neither Finnish nor English participated through digital translators and methods designed so language never gated participation. That constraint shaped the instrument rather than the sample: the questions got simpler and more concrete, and the interviews got longer.