Designing spaces that pull people in
Runelynxz is a practice-oriented workshop platform based in Rauma, Finland. We focus on one specific discipline: designing for immersive environments — spaces where the boundary between participant and content disappears. Our workshops are built around doing, not watching.
Where this started
When Runelynxz held its first workshop in 2017, the goal was modest: give designers a structured place to test ideas for physical and hybrid environments without needing a full production budget. Rauma gave us a compact, connected community where people could meet regularly and build on each other's work across sessions.
Immersive design sits at an awkward intersection — part architecture, part interaction design, part narrative. Most training treats these as separate tracks. Our workshops treat them as one problem. A participant might spend a morning mapping sensory flow through a space, then an afternoon prototyping the audio triggers that respond to movement within it.
The format evolved through iteration, not planning. Early participants pushed back on abstract theory, so we cut it. They asked for peer critique built into the schedule, so we added it. The current structure reflects what actually helped people build usable skills, not what looked good in a syllabus.
- Step-by-step assignments with clear deliverables at each stage
- Collaborative critique sessions with structured feedback formats
- Exercises grounded in real tools — Unity, Unreal, physical prototyping
- Small cohorts so every participant gets direct attention
The people behind the workshops
A small team with specific expertise — no generalists, no filler roles.
Tuulikki Harjula
Lead Workshop Designer
Tuulikki structures the assignment sequences and pacing for each workshop format. She spent six years designing visitor experiences for cultural institutions before moving into education, and that background shapes how she frames design problems — always from the perspective of the person moving through the space.
Rasmus Eklöf
Immersive Environment Specialist
Rasmus leads the technical exercises — spatial audio, real-time rendering pipelines, and sensor-driven interaction systems. He works with participants on the parts of immersive design that require code and hardware knowledge alongside aesthetic judgment. His sessions are deliberately hands-on from the first minute.
Siiri Vanhanen
Participant Experience Coordinator
Siiri manages cohort logistics, feedback collection, and the collaborative tools participants use between sessions. She tracks where people get stuck and feeds that back into how future workshops are structured. A lot of what works well in the current format came from patterns she noticed in participant behavior over time.
Practical knowledge, shared directly
Each person on the team still does active project work outside of Runelynxz. That matters because it keeps the workshop content connected to real constraints — budget limits, client feedback, technical failure modes — rather than drifting toward idealized case studies. What participants learn here reflects how immersive design actually gets made.
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