Interview with the winners of the Helsinki 5G Base Station Contest: Team Stadika (Keny Muesa, Pekka Selonen and Aaro Sariola)
Having placed 1st in the design contest, co-creating the future of the City Of Helsinki - and winning 20.000 € in the process. Must have been quite the start for 2019 – how are you feeling today?
One of the topmost feeling is unreal. The competition period was quite hectic and busy for us, as we sacrificed most of our free time on the project. After the competition closure, we have been feeling quite relieved and honored from the excellent feedback and credits our proposal got from the jury and the present stakeholders in the award ceremony. Now, we are just hoping that the early success is just a small part of what 2019 will bring, and that during the year we would witness and had the possibility to participate on the further development of our base station concept.
In your words – what is the best thing about winning this contest?
Well like most of the times, one of the best parts of winning is the prize itself. This time the prize is a secondary thing, since attending the competition with a cross-functional team was a great experience that really reinforced our professional skills and gave confidence in our making.
What do you think gave your design the winning edge?
We believe our strength in the competition was our ability to combine technology and design. With our interdisciplinary expertise and local knowledge of Helsinki, we were able to provide a concept of a boldly different and recognizable base station, which thanks to its material contrast, continuous shape and optimized structures fully supports the needs of 5G. In our opinion, the winning edge was that Stadika does not try to hide or to steal the attention, but to become an essential part of the city it’s been designed for.
How did you come up with the base station design? What was your inspiration?
The form of Stadika was inspired by architecture and environments of Helsinki. 5G requires dense network of base station, so functionally we were looking for cost-effective solutions that fits to different environments of Helsinki. The base station had to be easy to assemble, install and maintain. Naturally, we went through many different variations of shapes and functional solutions until stadika got its final form.
Now that you are a part of the 5G future of Helsinki – what do you think will be most impacted by the 5G technology?
It is hard to say what will be most impacted, because 5G will have holistic impact. You could say 5G makes possible to build true smart cities. When you combine 5G, IoT, huge amount of data and for example AR/VR, there will be services that you can't even imagine. That's why we believe that in the future Helsinki will be especially agile city that offers better and safer services.
Moving on to the operational part of your win: How did you come in contact with the Helsinki 5G Base Station on OpEN?
We found the Helsinki 5G Base Station contest via social media. After that we all did the registration and all necessary operations regarding to competition on OpEN which was extremely handy.
In what ways did working with OpEN make things easier for you?
In our case OpEn made the whole contest process feel quite straightforward for us. We had all the necessary resources, deadlines and requirements easily available in the same location without needing to browse through various hastily made contest sites or platforms. This was vital for us since we weren’t always able to meet up to work on the project together and would constantly need to check on some technicalities on the go.
Why would you recommend up and comers working with OpEN to get in touch with the “big players”?
Well we did win the contest so there’s that. In all seriousness, we feel that an open and anonymous contest like this one is a great way for rising talents to get their work out there. Without something like OpEn it would be quite difficult for three random friends working on their free time to even dream about going against some bigger agencies in a contest like this.
One final question – what’s the next thing you will be working on after winning the contest?
We hope that this has just been the beginning of the Stadika 5G project and we’re eager to see where it might develop from here. As far as future projects go, this definitely won’t be the last one you’ll see from us. We’re always open for any interesting proposals!