The year 2020 was special to us all, but very special to 6G Flagship, University of Oulu’s flagship programme focused on 6G research. The programme is first in the world to research 6G, and it’s funded by the Academy of Finland. In the 6G Summit 2019, the programmes very own annual event, it was decided, that the programme would form special expert groups to create twelve white papers focusing on different research visions around 6G.

When I started working for the programme, I also got to take part in this huge endeavor. My task in the project was to lay out the papers and help with the tables and figures the papers would have. Laying the papers out was a fairly straight-forward process. I wanted to optimize the papers for printing with regular office printers, but also make them look good on the screen, since we were mostly aiming for the digital publishing due to the global situation. The possibility that we would eventually have the papers printed professionally needed to stay open, though. In the end, it the end product became a pretty good compromise between all the necessary medias.

The most challenging part was definitely drawing the figures. Sometimes I would get really clear, basically “ready” figures from the authors, that just needed some pictograms, colors and typography to fit our official brand. Sometimes it would be a hand-drawn sketch to start from, which gave me much freedom, but also really forced me to learn about the futuristic technologies behind the research papers. Also, how do you even depict an antenna, that doesn’t officially exist yet? I had to be clever, and really ponder what would be the most simplistic way to depict things. 

The project was an enormous effort, one indication being that I ended up creating around a hundred little pictograms for the figures alone. As I write this, all but one of the papers have been published, and the last one will come out in just a few weeks. You can read all the published papers at our website “6G Channel”.