DfG 
The first blog of the 2023 DfG course dissects the focus of the mission in the new design brief ‘Life events for a dignified old age’ and presents the roundtable discussions we’ve held to gain a preliminary understanding of the issues and the plan for the next step.
Find out more about the projects for Design for Government 2023 at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture.
Would you like to work on your policy challenge with our talented students at Aalto University? We are looking for Finnish public organisations to provide student projects for our course Design for Government in March. If you work on sustainability transitions, governance or cross-cutting national-level challenges, please contact us! Each year we collaborate with Finnish … Read more
The Design for Government 2022 Final Show showcases inspiring examples of proactive and ‘designerly’ approaches to policy-making and public service provision. The event saw 6 talented and multidisciplinary student teams present their research and proposals responding to challenges within the Finnish public sector. This year, students addressed a record of two different project briefs, with … Read more
Project Description This project focuses on the current reform of employment services, moving the TE office (The Employment and Economic Development Office) to the municipal level during 2024. Such administration restructure means significant changes to the thousands of employees working in TE Office and municipalities working with employment matters, becoming a substantial part of what … Read more
Project Description Finland has 41 national parks, which are conservation areas. Visitor numbers of protected and recreational areas in Finland are growing, especially in national parks. In 2021, there were over 4 million visitors to national parks, which is 25% more than in 2019. However, visitor footprint and interactions with nature can hurt the environment … Read more
In this blog, I’ll describe the thinking process towards our final proposal the Nuuksio Collaboratory. It is a one-year program where visitors of Nuuksio National Park participate in a citizen science project led by Metsähallitus scientists to co-create solutions for the local biodiversity loss.
This blog post retraces the last three weeks of the Design for Government project of group 2B with a focus on the making process prior to the toolkit for acts of appreciation. It highlights the complexity of working on organizational culture and reflects on the differences in appreciation cultures between different sectors.
From co-creation workshops to validation with Metsähallitus to our team’s ‘aha’ moment. Finally, we have arrived at the final proposal of growing nature-savvy visitors in the Finnish national parks by finishing it up with an in-person presentation on May 23.
In the final weeks of the course, our attention turned to defining our design proposal more comprehensively and preparing to present our efforts in the final show. While these initially seemed like two distinct activities, preparing the presentation actually turned out to be a helpful thinking tool that supported us in developing our proposal.