Finland’s ageing population is challenging the coordination of the current care system. While medical data is being stored and collected, information about the social aspects of ageing still struggles to enter the system. In this scenario, integrating social and health care is the direction to take, ensuring continuity of knowledge to support this demographic shift.
After engaging with officials from the Open Government Finland initiative, and the Helsinki Elderly Citizens Council, an exercise of systems analysis was a great way to understand the phenomenon of Aging Population with relation to Open Government in Finland. Reframing the aging population as an opportunity for intergenerational collaboration, rather than a crisis, reveals untapped opportunities.
Our project reimagines Open Government Finland as an orchestrator of action coherence, ensuring that insights from diverse stakeholders—municipalities, civil society, and citizens—translate into meaningful governance. We explore strategies to enhance participation, strengthen feedback loops, and drive impactful, transparent decision-making.
Finland’s ageing population demands a more innovative, more connected healthcare system, but a fragmented system threatens patient care in Finland. As a continuation of the first blog post, this one focuses more on systems in healthcare. In our conclusion, social workers hold the key to bridging gaps between medical, social, and informal care.
Admist increasing healthcare costs, a shrinking tax base to fund healthcare, an aging population that will demand more health services, continuity of care is a proposed model to make healthcare more efficiently able to cope with the future. Underpinning continuity of care is the continuity of knowledge and information and how it is structured.
This blog entry summarises findings concerning healthcare reform “SOTE” and a new General Practitioner model. The short text provides reasons for both changes introduced by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health & Finnish Government highlighting its positive and negative implications. Ultimately, an uncomfortable, speculative question emerges: Might these changes neglect doctors’ well-being?
The first blog post explores the context-setting stage of the Open Government project, focusing on the role of the ageing population and public service in Finnish governance. It highlights the challenges of the negative perception of elderly citizens and barriers to their political participation. The post also reflects on understanding policy language and upstream thinking to create impactful proposals.
This blog reports our research progress and learning highlights on designing for the government, focusing on the Action Plan and elderly inclusion workstream under the Open Government initiative by the Ministry of Finance.
The first blog of the Digitalization and Kanta Workstream presents an initial understanding of Finland’s and international digital healthcare services through desktop research. The importance of initiative for both the users and the providers, the inclusiveness for ageing groups in digitalization, and the focus of Kanta as a centralization platform is addressed.
This blog explores how policies transform into real engagement under the topic of elderly participation initiatives. However, a heated meeting in Vantaa revealed the challenge: how can elderly participation truly engage in decision-making? Key organizations include the Finnish Ministry of Finance, City of Helsinki, City of Vantaa, and Elderly Citizens Council.
How do you understand aging, participation, and open government? This spring,
our class is exploring how Finland’s commitment to open governance supports older citizens as
active participants in society. In this blog, we’ll discuss key aspects of our research, including
language alignment, challenges of meaningful participation, and the strengths and limitations of
incremental policy change.
In our project, we analyze Finland’s elderly health and social care system, mapping key actors, services, and data flows. With the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and Kela, we investigate how patient information is managed, where gaps exist, and how better information sharing could enhance elderly care.
This blog provides a thumbnail of our final proposal. From this blog you are able to have a glimpse through our proposed four-step process toward a network of change agents. Also, some behind-the-scenes insights could be discovered here.
Our group identified excessive administrative burdens on Finland’s public healthcare professionals as a major obstacle to quality of care for patients. We beleive that reintroducing medical assistants to handle non-medical tasks should recuduce this obstacle. However, to do so, we have to convince our partners of the necessity and cost-efficiency of this reinstatement by speaking their language.
“How did you go from improving patient feedback to a co-innovation programme?” This blog post reflects on our journey to our final proposal. Inspired by Michael Porter’s value-based care and Nesta’s Creative Councils case, we proposed a programme to cultivate and share follow-up practices nationwide.
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by group 1C dealing with the Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry … Read more
How do we shift from fragmented healthcare to cohesive, continuous care? This blog post provides a concluding recap of our research and ideation process and introduces our final proposal: an adaptive and evolving action plan with three levels of intervention.
In this blog, Group 1B will present our exciting proposal! Let’s take a look at our work in progress over the last few weeks and how we co-created with our stakeholders to turn the key entry point into our final proposal.
The third blog post from group 2A is focused on the research process of our project on continuity of care in primary healthcare. This project has been developed in collaboration with Kela and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. The blog post showcases the current process of the project and discusses more deeply the process of the vision and entry points.
In this blog post, we explore what we can learn from the unexpected similarities between a design intervention in the Finnish healthcare system and the ‘rules & dynamics’ of relationships.
In the process on finding solutions for a better healthcare system, we delve into the intricacies of Finland’s healthcare landscape. With a focus on continuity of care, we navigate the complexities, identifying opportunities and entry points. Yet, the journey towards finding a solution is full of challenges, and we are on the way to finding the best possible outcomes.
This blog post updates group 1B’s progress on tackling biodiversity policy coherence for the Finnish Ministry of Environment. It covers the second half of the project, where the team start deploying design methods and interventions for policy. Looking ahead to the ideation session with the civil servants, the team is approaching the final design proposal soon.
Among our general policymakers who are path-independent and insusceptible to change, some individuals are motivated to take initiative and bring radical transformation within their organization. Together with our partner, the Prime Minister’s Office (VNK), we see these “Change Agents” as potential actors for achieving Finland’s biodiversity goals. Small actions by these change agents can have big impacts on supporting policy coherence for biodiversity.
Utilizing leverage points and bounded rationality, our Aalto University Design for Government team is developing three key ideas to foster connections between nature, the Finnish Ministry of the Environment and their supporting agencies. Our aim? To nurture mutual understanding, fun and strong relationships, smoothing the way to cohesive biodiversity policies for future generations.
In the ongoing Continuity of Care series, this blog throws light on the crucial role of General Practitioners in navigating the complex labyrinth of the Finnish healthcare system. However, the burden of heavy workloads and unfavorable working conditions often drives many GPs to pursue further specialization or depart from the public sector, thereby worsening staff retention issues in a perpetual loop. Understanding the factors contributing to poor working conditions highlights the urgent need for reforms and remedies to retain GPs and ensure conducive work environments.
This blog post explores the interdependency between the users and the healthcare system, introducing the juxtaposition of “Customer and patient”. How can continuity of care be adapted to our future society and be extended into other areas of life?
This is the second blog of group A1 about their work on Policy coherence in Biodiversity in collaboration with the Prime Minister’s Office. It poses questions stemming from their research and provides the basis for the second phase of the design process.
In this blog post, Beste Polatkal from Group 2A shares research findings on improving the continuity of care in Finland’s healthcare system through a “Whys” analysis. The issues explored are major issues like doctor shortages & heavy workloads and it is discussed how better teamwork might create opportunities for better continuity.
The working title of our project is “Exploring the Vertical Ecosystem”. Just like an ecosystem, we see the different agencies and research institutes affiliated to The Ministry of Environment as entagled and interconnected, feeding off of and into each other. At this point in our project we have concluded our research phase, taking a keen interest in the human perspective of the system.
During the past few weeks, we dove into the Ministry of Environment. Our interviews revealed that behind all biodiversity policies are civil servants, whose realities are shaped by human interaction and experiences. At the end of our research we connected the dots, which created a picture of barriers to the biodiversity policy coherence we yearn for.
In this blogpost a member from group 2B presents the group’s initial exploration of the given design brief on continuity of care in the Finnish healthcare system. Core issues discovered are shared and the path forwards projected by connecting the brief to key frameworks from systems thinking and design.
Cross-fertilisation is interaction or interchange, as between cultures, fields of activity, or knowledge, that is mutually beneficial and productive. Together with the Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry of Environment we have started to explore how biodiversity could be transformed into all-of-government ownership. How could this cross-fertilisation look between the ministries as well as within their agencies, institutes, and service providers?
A large part of this blog consists of questions. As we are taking the first steps in our project, we find ourselves immersed in them: Questions upon questions and answers that raise new questions. In this first part, we try to familiarize ourselves with the topic, meet our partners for the first time, and discuss our priorities as well as our direction in research.
This blog is about an initiative by a multidisciplinary group of students to address biodiversity issues in Finland in cooperation with the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of the Environment. We recognize the urgency of the biodiversity crisis and the complexity of governance structures. While we also recognize that there are time constraints to finding quick solutions, we are committed to considering proposals to address the challenge. The group’s approach involves conducting research, mapping governance systems, and engaging with relevant stakeholders. We emphasize the importance of understanding the different perspectives on biodiversity that exist to reach a common understanding and address the problem effectively. The team includes people with backgrounds in design, architecture, and sustainable development, reflecting a holistic approach to problem-solving.
This blog post is the first post by Group 1B on their project on biodiversity policy coherence at an interdepartmental level at the Ministry of the Environment. It covers background reading, a roundtable with external partners and the development of a research agenda.
We are conducting a project about the opportunities for improving Continuity of Care with our partners Kela and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. The main focus for our group is the patients’ point of view. We aim to explore ways in which patients’ behaviour could be incentivized to uphold CoC.
By incorporating a user-centred perspective, conducting systemic analysis, and fostering co-creation and engagement, we can transform the way we perceive and experience accessible transportation. In this last blog post we introduce our final solution, a comprehensive framework capable of achieving this transformation.
Team 1A sees that harmonising the public digital services is a solution for the troubles the users are facing. But how it can be done? Our final proposal is described here!
When putting together the puzzle, we are always trying to find a special piece from tons of them, the perfect one, the one with semi-round shapes to reach in all four directions. When thinking about our proposal for having accessible travel chains, we Urban Drifters felt were putting together a large puzzle.
This post explores a comprehensive proposal that strives to equip The Ministry of Transport and Communications (LVM) with a resilient framework centered around collaboration. This multilayered structure is purposefully designed to endure and foster a renewed perspective on accessibility among all the organizations involved in Finland’s public transport travel chain.
This post gives an overview of our final proposal and a reflection on it. The proposal is to nudge people to start preparing for their retirement earlier so they can have more options when getting older. With our proposal, we also want to encourage people to reflect on their life.
In collaboration with the Digital Population and Data Services (DVV) and the Ministry of Finance (VM), we explored the trends surrounding Finland’s diverse and aging population. As a result, we propose Tomorrow Together – a four stages-framework that adopts a life course perspective through predictive governance and multi-party collaboration into policy making.
Welcome to Urban drifters. This blog will highlight parts of our progress when creating an intervention from an insight. It will go through the steps we have discovered during our ideating sessions, and we will try to answer the difficult question of what an accessible travel chain actually is.
The public transport system in Finland has issues with working with each other. What is needed is to create a structure for collaboration. Together with the Ministry of Transport & Communications (LVM), Traficom, and the service providers HSL and VR, group 2A looks closer at how to achieve effective collaboration to ensure accessibility in the public transport system.
This blog picks up the problem framing stage around the ‘Dignified old age’ brief and explores further identifying a point of intervention and how to go about it reflectively. How could we solve multiple challenges we faced through strategic interventions that impact the whole system?
This post provides an overview of the reflections we are currently carrying out in the context of imagining a design intervention. Here I discuss about how we reframed our approach in order to emphasise the importance of self-reflection and how we used storytelling to convey a large amount of information in an accessible way. I then suggest that a possible part of the solution to this apparent structural problem may lie in a smaller scale intervention.
Using narratives is a practice we all constantly do. In this blog we will look into how service designers can facilitate a platform for both stakeholders and users, to create a more efficient and accessible future.
What are the current standards and objectives of digitized services? Do users and providers share the same expectations and goals? Group 1A members, in collaboration with DVV and the Finnish Ministry of Finance, investigate the existing service system to identify a leverage point where the needs of users and service providers can align.
This post explores the challenges of achieving universal accessibility in public transport, including the conflict between macro and micro-level implementation and barriers met at the micro-level. It highlights the importance of addressing systemic and individual barriers to create more accessible transport chains. What is required to achieve universal accessibility?
This blog post gives an insight into our analysis of the organizational environment of retirement. I talk about what it was like to deal with complexity, use systems thinking to question the obvious, and how not to let it overwhelm you.
What are the main issues in the present transport system? Which challenges will the service providers face in the future? How should public travel chains be in the future? In the last three weeks, we collaborated with national and local service providers, user associations and municipalities to answer these questions.
This post will present to you the research process we have carried out over the past four weeks, in which we have sought to better understand the transport system, tracing the interweaving of its network together with stakeholders.
Where do policy and design meet? How different or similar are their processes? And how can design help policy to suit “human scale”? These are some of the questions that have arisen during the first two weeks’ discussions and reflections on the Design for Government course.
A dignified old age and the retirement event have several connections we had to discover. Our group’s objective over the previous three weeks has been to comprehend the perspective of retired people through field research and identify the critical life events that lead to being dignified and how digitalisation influences it as a tool.
This first blog post is an invitation to join our journey on the path of public transport chains and accessibility! You will hear about our research, understandings, activities, and questionings related to the topic.
Designing an accessible travel train requires empathy, as well as understanding diverse narratives and perspectives. Service providers’ will play a crucial role in the project’s success. However, there may be a discrepancy in understanding among organizations due to the complex context. Figuring out a dynamic system keeping users’ evolving needs in mind is necessary.
What should be the ‘standard’ in our society? Is it conforming to the ‘standard’ of the majority, or is it the ‘standard’ to conform to all? Together with the Ministry of Transport & Communications (LVM), Fintraffic, Traficom, and the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency (VÄYLÄ), group 2A looks closer at accessibility in the public transport system.
Welcome on board! Through this first blog post, your will learn about our very first steps regarding the “Life events for dignified old age” adventure, such as our understanding of the project brief, the roundtable discussion with our partners, and a few elements about our research strategy.
Where do policy and design meet? How different or similar are their processes? And how can design help policy to suit “human scale”? These are some of the questions that have arisen during the first two weeks’ discussions and reflections on the Design for Government course.
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.
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.
This blog goes through the final steps in the process of team 1C to our final design proposal to Metsähallitus and the Ministry of Environment, and our efforts to combine human-centered design methods and environmental sustainability. It explores the role of design for government, in this case for a state-owned enterprise, in the Anthropocene.
We will take you along the final stretch of our design process where we synthesise our research into an actionable government proposal. We present our solution as a proposal for The Ministry of Employment and Economic Affairs to form a working group and collaboratively design a peer learning program with the help of our design tool.
Looking at TE-offices, KELA´s and municipalities civil servants, caseworkers, through the exercises at the DfG-course, storytelling, storyboarding and scenarios. From this work finding that appreciation could be the key of solving well-being issues and figuring out what kind of actions appreciation could be and how this can effect the reform and unemployment rate in Finland.
The blog shares the transition from the research phase towards exploring the design intervention in efforts for finding means to establish a dialogue from our primary stakeholder (biodiversity) through a project brief by Metsähallitus and the Ministry of the Environment.
This blog post explores our process of moving from the 3 main identified problem areas into some possible interventions. It is described how different frameworks allowed us to identify desired scenarios, in which learning happens collaboratively among peers rather than from a top-down approach. Some potential solutions are explored.
As a third update from the DfG course project, we will open our process working towards meaningful design intervention. Since the last post, we have moved from defining the problem to ideating the solution for improving the international jobseekers’ experience.
This blog post describes our process and steps of the last few weeks to get closer to our solution. We got inspiration in developing a design intervention that aims to improve shared understanding amongst Metsähallitus departments and preserve the biodiversity of national parks by applying the policy lab tool.
By forming our user scenario, we can find inspiration in developing nudges that serve to improve the visitor experience and protect the biodiversity of national parks. This method of working not only connects us to the problem area we look to solve but helps us to get closer to our design intervention.
Finnish design project provided by the Ministry of Finance focusing on solving the needs of the public servants (in Kela, TE offices and municipalities) involved in the transition from the 15 TE offices to 309+ municipalities due to the TE services reform 2024, via people-centric and public strategy renewal ideas.
These past two weeks we focused on unearthing challenges, triumphs and expectations with on-the-ground employees from different organisations which are a part of the TE2024 reform and identifying challenging areas where we can intervene. So far we have outlined three main problem segments that resurfaced often when discussing different reform activities.
Climate change is taking its toll on biodiversity everywhere but something lurking in the shadows of public media is the visitors’ contribution to biodiversity loss in national parks. Ideologies of systems thinking helped us to understand this spider legged topic further and eventually even led us to our problem area: Value of the guidelines is not realized by the visitors in relation to their impacts to biodiversity.
Team 1B is working on Metsähallitus’ and the Ministry of the Environment’s brief about the future of sustainable recreation. How can national parks be preserved in the future, as visitor numbers continue to grow? Through research and design interventions, the project seeks solutions to behaviors that harm the nature in conservation areas.
During the second phase of our project on the TE2024 reform, we mainly focused on analysing our interview data. The most important insight we gained is that international jobseekers have very specific needs during the different steps of their journey. How well these needs are being met translates back to their personal relation with the formal employment services.
This blog post reports how our second quarter of research has been done. We develop our research scope by focusing on the Uusimaa region, especially Nuuksio National Park and its neighboring forests. We looked up organizations that manage various types of regenerative and nature education activities for a wide range of the general public in the region. We evolved our direction of research that concentrates on Nature Education, Regenerative activities, and Sense of community after using different mapping tools. This blog will mainly report stakeholder and causal loop maps to describe our findings and what we understand at this stage.
How can we resolve the conflict between promoting visits and conserving biodiversity in Finnish National Parks? We are exploring the possibility of bridging different organisations in order to enhance regenerative activities in nature areas. In this blog, I will outline what we have done, what we grasped and what we will do so far.
This blog post reports on the work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by group 2C dealing with the Ministry of Finance’s brief … Read more
How to protect biodiversity in Finnish nature recreational areas from the increasing number of visitors? In this first blog, group 1A deep-dive in understanding the issues and finding insights with a human-centred approach through different stakeholders such as nature itself, Metsähallitus, The Ministry of the Environment, and Visitors.
What does a human-centered employment services reform look like? In this blog Group 2A reflects on their starting points on a journey to understand a government reform with all its stakeholders, and explores how applying a human-centered lens influences how we see both the bigger picture and details.
Finnish design project provided by the Ministry of Finance focusing on solving the needs of the public servants (in Kela, TE offices and municipalities) involved in the transition from the 15 TE offices to 309+ municipalities due to the TE services reform 2024, via people-centric and public strategy renewal ideas.
From understanding the project brief to unpacking sustainability into layers, and to finding in-depth research directions, we used human-centered approach to analyze motivations and challenges faced in the project by Metsähallitus and the Ministry of the Environment.
Blog IV – Reducing the carbon footprint of public procurement – Kela Maternity package Group 2A: Xinghua Meng, Kalle Kaisko, Michael Buchta from the Creative … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the brief on ‘Pilot project for Personal Budgeting Model’, … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the Ministry of Interior’s brief on ‘Strategy for … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the Ministry of Interior’s brief on ‘Strategy for … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment’s … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the brief on ‘Pilot project for Personal Budgeting Model’, … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by the group dealing with the Ministry of Interior’s brief on ‘Strategy for … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by the group dealing with the Ministry of Interior’s brief on ‘Strategy for … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by the group dealing with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by the group dealing with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the Ministry of Interior’s brief on ‘Strategy for … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment’s … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post are written by the group dealing with the brief on ‘Pilot project for Personal Budgeting … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post are written by the group dealing with the brief on ‘Pilot project for Personal Budgeting … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post are written by the group dealing with the brief on ‘Pilot project for Personal Budgeting … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by the group dealing with the Ministry of Interior’s brief on ‘Strategy … Read more
Finland’s ageing population is challenging the coordination of the current care system. While medical data is being stored and collected, information about the social aspects of ageing still struggles to enter the system. In this scenario, integrating social and health care is the direction to take, ensuring continuity of knowledge to support this demographic shift.
After engaging with officials from the Open Government Finland initiative, and the Helsinki Elderly Citizens Council, an exercise of systems analysis was a great way to understand the phenomenon of Aging Population with relation to Open Government in Finland. Reframing the aging population as an opportunity for intergenerational collaboration, rather than a crisis, reveals untapped opportunities.
Our project reimagines Open Government Finland as an orchestrator of action coherence, ensuring that insights from diverse stakeholders—municipalities, civil society, and citizens—translate into meaningful governance. We explore strategies to enhance participation, strengthen feedback loops, and drive impactful, transparent decision-making.
Finland’s ageing population demands a more innovative, more connected healthcare system, but a fragmented system threatens patient care in Finland. As a continuation of the first blog post, this one focuses more on systems in healthcare. In our conclusion, social workers hold the key to bridging gaps between medical, social, and informal care.
Admist increasing healthcare costs, a shrinking tax base to fund healthcare, an aging population that will demand more health services, continuity of care is a proposed model to make healthcare more efficiently able to cope with the future. Underpinning continuity of care is the continuity of knowledge and information and how it is structured.
This blog entry summarises findings concerning healthcare reform “SOTE” and a new General Practitioner model. The short text provides reasons for both changes introduced by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health & Finnish Government highlighting its positive and negative implications. Ultimately, an uncomfortable, speculative question emerges: Might these changes neglect doctors’ well-being?
The first blog post explores the context-setting stage of the Open Government project, focusing on the role of the ageing population and public service in Finnish governance. It highlights the challenges of the negative perception of elderly citizens and barriers to their political participation. The post also reflects on understanding policy language and upstream thinking to create impactful proposals.
This blog reports our research progress and learning highlights on designing for the government, focusing on the Action Plan and elderly inclusion workstream under the Open Government initiative by the Ministry of Finance.
The first blog of the Digitalization and Kanta Workstream presents an initial understanding of Finland’s and international digital healthcare services through desktop research. The importance of initiative for both the users and the providers, the inclusiveness for ageing groups in digitalization, and the focus of Kanta as a centralization platform is addressed.
This blog explores how policies transform into real engagement under the topic of elderly participation initiatives. However, a heated meeting in Vantaa revealed the challenge: how can elderly participation truly engage in decision-making? Key organizations include the Finnish Ministry of Finance, City of Helsinki, City of Vantaa, and Elderly Citizens Council.
How do you understand aging, participation, and open government? This spring, our class is exploring how Finland’s commitment to open governance supports older citizens as active participants in society. In this blog, we’ll discuss key aspects of our research, including language alignment, challenges of meaningful participation, and the strengths and limitations of incremental policy change.
In our project, we analyze Finland’s elderly health and social care system, mapping key actors, services, and data flows. With the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and Kela, we investigate how patient information is managed, where gaps exist, and how better information sharing could enhance elderly care.
This blog provides a thumbnail of our final proposal. From this blog you are able to have a glimpse through our proposed four-step process toward a network of change agents. Also, some behind-the-scenes insights could be discovered here.
Our group identified excessive administrative burdens on Finland’s public healthcare professionals as a major obstacle to quality of care for patients. We beleive that reintroducing medical assistants to handle non-medical tasks should recuduce this obstacle. However, to do so, we have to convince our partners of the necessity and cost-efficiency of this reinstatement by speaking their language.
“How did you go from improving patient feedback to a co-innovation programme?” This blog post reflects on our journey to our final proposal. Inspired by Michael Porter’s value-based care and Nesta’s Creative Councils case, we proposed a programme to cultivate and share follow-up practices nationwide.
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by group 1C dealing with the Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry … Read more
How do we shift from fragmented healthcare to cohesive, continuous care? This blog post provides a concluding recap of our research and ideation process and introduces our final proposal: an adaptive and evolving action plan with three levels of intervention.
In this blog, Group 1B will present our exciting proposal! Let’s take a look at our work in progress over the last few weeks and how we co-created with our stakeholders to turn the key entry point into our final proposal.
The third blog post from group 2A is focused on the research process of our project on continuity of care in primary healthcare. This project has been developed in collaboration with Kela and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. The blog post showcases the current process of the project and discusses more deeply the process of the vision and entry points.
In this blog post, we explore what we can learn from the unexpected similarities between a design intervention in the Finnish healthcare system and the ‘rules & dynamics’ of relationships.
In the process on finding solutions for a better healthcare system, we delve into the intricacies of Finland’s healthcare landscape. With a focus on continuity of care, we navigate the complexities, identifying opportunities and entry points. Yet, the journey towards finding a solution is full of challenges, and we are on the way to finding the best possible outcomes.
This blog post updates group 1B’s progress on tackling biodiversity policy coherence for the Finnish Ministry of Environment. It covers the second half of the project, where the team start deploying design methods and interventions for policy. Looking ahead to the ideation session with the civil servants, the team is approaching the final design proposal soon.
Among our general policymakers who are path-independent and insusceptible to change, some individuals are motivated to take initiative and bring radical transformation within their organization. Together with our partner, the Prime Minister’s Office (VNK), we see these “Change Agents” as potential actors for achieving Finland’s biodiversity goals. Small actions by these change agents can have big impacts on supporting policy coherence for biodiversity.
Utilizing leverage points and bounded rationality, our Aalto University Design for Government team is developing three key ideas to foster connections between nature, the Finnish Ministry of the Environment and their supporting agencies. Our aim? To nurture mutual understanding, fun and strong relationships, smoothing the way to cohesive biodiversity policies for future generations.
In the ongoing Continuity of Care series, this blog throws light on the crucial role of General Practitioners in navigating the complex labyrinth of the Finnish healthcare system. However, the burden of heavy workloads and unfavorable working conditions often drives many GPs to pursue further specialization or depart from the public sector, thereby worsening staff retention issues in a perpetual loop. Understanding the factors contributing to poor working conditions highlights the urgent need for reforms and remedies to retain GPs and ensure conducive work environments.
This blog post explores the interdependency between the users and the healthcare system, introducing the juxtaposition of “Customer and patient”. How can continuity of care be adapted to our future society and be extended into other areas of life?
This is the second blog of group A1 about their work on Policy coherence in Biodiversity in collaboration with the Prime Minister’s Office. It poses questions stemming from their research and provides the basis for the second phase of the design process.
In this blog post, Beste Polatkal from Group 2A shares research findings on improving the continuity of care in Finland’s healthcare system through a “Whys” analysis. The issues explored are major issues like doctor shortages & heavy workloads and it is discussed how better teamwork might create opportunities for better continuity.
The working title of our project is “Exploring the Vertical Ecosystem”. Just like an ecosystem, we see the different agencies and research institutes affiliated to The Ministry of Environment as entagled and interconnected, feeding off of and into each other. At this point in our project we have concluded our research phase, taking a keen interest in the human perspective of the system.
During the past few weeks, we dove into the Ministry of Environment. Our interviews revealed that behind all biodiversity policies are civil servants, whose realities are shaped by human interaction and experiences. At the end of our research we connected the dots, which created a picture of barriers to the biodiversity policy coherence we yearn for.
In this blogpost a member from group 2B presents the group’s initial exploration of the given design brief on continuity of care in the Finnish healthcare system. Core issues discovered are shared and the path forwards projected by connecting the brief to key frameworks from systems thinking and design.
Cross-fertilisation is interaction or interchange, as between cultures, fields of activity, or knowledge, that is mutually beneficial and productive. Together with the Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry of Environment we have started to explore how biodiversity could be transformed into all-of-government ownership. How could this cross-fertilisation look between the ministries as well as within their agencies, institutes, and service providers?
A large part of this blog consists of questions. As we are taking the first steps in our project, we find ourselves immersed in them: Questions upon questions and answers that raise new questions. In this first part, we try to familiarize ourselves with the topic, meet our partners for the first time, and discuss our priorities as well as our direction in research.
This blog is about an initiative by a multidisciplinary group of students to address biodiversity issues in Finland in cooperation with the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of the Environment. We recognize the urgency of the biodiversity crisis and the complexity of governance structures. While we also recognize that there are time constraints to finding quick solutions, we are committed to considering proposals to address the challenge. The group’s approach involves conducting research, mapping governance systems, and engaging with relevant stakeholders. We emphasize the importance of understanding the different perspectives on biodiversity that exist to reach a common understanding and address the problem effectively. The team includes people with backgrounds in design, architecture, and sustainable development, reflecting a holistic approach to problem-solving.
This blog post is the first post by Group 1B on their project on biodiversity policy coherence at an interdepartmental level at the Ministry of the Environment. It covers background reading, a roundtable with external partners and the development of a research agenda.
We are conducting a project about the opportunities for improving Continuity of Care with our partners Kela and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health. The main focus for our group is the patients’ point of view. We aim to explore ways in which patients’ behaviour could be incentivized to uphold CoC.
By incorporating a user-centred perspective, conducting systemic analysis, and fostering co-creation and engagement, we can transform the way we perceive and experience accessible transportation. In this last blog post we introduce our final solution, a comprehensive framework capable of achieving this transformation.
Team 1A sees that harmonising the public digital services is a solution for the troubles the users are facing. But how it can be done? Our final proposal is described here!
When putting together the puzzle, we are always trying to find a special piece from tons of them, the perfect one, the one with semi-round shapes to reach in all four directions. When thinking about our proposal for having accessible travel chains, we Urban Drifters felt were putting together a large puzzle.
This post explores a comprehensive proposal that strives to equip The Ministry of Transport and Communications (LVM) with a resilient framework centered around collaboration. This multilayered structure is purposefully designed to endure and foster a renewed perspective on accessibility among all the organizations involved in Finland’s public transport travel chain.
This post gives an overview of our final proposal and a reflection on it. The proposal is to nudge people to start preparing for their retirement earlier so they can have more options when getting older. With our proposal, we also want to encourage people to reflect on their life.
In collaboration with the Digital Population and Data Services (DVV) and the Ministry of Finance (VM), we explored the trends surrounding Finland’s diverse and aging population. As a result, we propose Tomorrow Together – a four stages-framework that adopts a life course perspective through predictive governance and multi-party collaboration into policy making.
Welcome to Urban drifters. This blog will highlight parts of our progress when creating an intervention from an insight. It will go through the steps we have discovered during our ideating sessions, and we will try to answer the difficult question of what an accessible travel chain actually is.
The public transport system in Finland has issues with working with each other. What is needed is to create a structure for collaboration. Together with the Ministry of Transport & Communications (LVM), Traficom, and the service providers HSL and VR, group 2A looks closer at how to achieve effective collaboration to ensure accessibility in the public transport system.
This blog picks up the problem framing stage around the ‘Dignified old age’ brief and explores further identifying a point of intervention and how to go about it reflectively. How could we solve multiple challenges we faced through strategic interventions that impact the whole system?
This post provides an overview of the reflections we are currently carrying out in the context of imagining a design intervention. Here I discuss about how we reframed our approach in order to emphasise the importance of self-reflection and how we used storytelling to convey a large amount of information in an accessible way. I then suggest that a possible part of the solution to this apparent structural problem may lie in a smaller scale intervention.
Using narratives is a practice we all constantly do. In this blog we will look into how service designers can facilitate a platform for both stakeholders and users, to create a more efficient and accessible future.
What are the current standards and objectives of digitized services? Do users and providers share the same expectations and goals? Group 1A members, in collaboration with DVV and the Finnish Ministry of Finance, investigate the existing service system to identify a leverage point where the needs of users and service providers can align.
This post explores the challenges of achieving universal accessibility in public transport, including the conflict between macro and micro-level implementation and barriers met at the micro-level. It highlights the importance of addressing systemic and individual barriers to create more accessible transport chains. What is required to achieve universal accessibility?
This blog post gives an insight into our analysis of the organizational environment of retirement. I talk about what it was like to deal with complexity, use systems thinking to question the obvious, and how not to let it overwhelm you.
What are the main issues in the present transport system? Which challenges will the service providers face in the future? How should public travel chains be in the future? In the last three weeks, we collaborated with national and local service providers, user associations and municipalities to answer these questions.
This post will present to you the research process we have carried out over the past four weeks, in which we have sought to better understand the transport system, tracing the interweaving of its network together with stakeholders.
Where do policy and design meet? How different or similar are their processes? And how can design help policy to suit “human scale”? These are some of the questions that have arisen during the first two weeks’ discussions and reflections on the Design for Government course.
A dignified old age and the retirement event have several connections we had to discover. Our group’s objective over the previous three weeks has been to comprehend the perspective of retired people through field research and identify the critical life events that lead to being dignified and how digitalisation influences it as a tool.
This first blog post is an invitation to join our journey on the path of public transport chains and accessibility! You will hear about our research, understandings, activities, and questionings related to the topic.
Designing an accessible travel train requires empathy, as well as understanding diverse narratives and perspectives. Service providers’ will play a crucial role in the project’s success. However, there may be a discrepancy in understanding among organizations due to the complex context. Figuring out a dynamic system keeping users’ evolving needs in mind is necessary.
What should be the ‘standard’ in our society? Is it conforming to the ‘standard’ of the majority, or is it the ‘standard’ to conform to all? Together with the Ministry of Transport & Communications (LVM), Fintraffic, Traficom, and the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency (VÄYLÄ), group 2A looks closer at accessibility in the public transport system.
Welcome on board! Through this first blog post, your will learn about our very first steps regarding the “Life events for dignified old age” adventure, such as our understanding of the project brief, the roundtable discussion with our partners, and a few elements about our research strategy.
Where do policy and design meet? How different or similar are their processes? And how can design help policy to suit “human scale”? These are some of the questions that have arisen during the first two weeks’ discussions and reflections on the Design for Government course.
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.
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.
This blog goes through the final steps in the process of team 1C to our final design proposal to Metsähallitus and the Ministry of Environment, and our efforts to combine human-centered design methods and environmental sustainability. It explores the role of design for government, in this case for a state-owned enterprise, in the Anthropocene.
We will take you along the final stretch of our design process where we synthesise our research into an actionable government proposal. We present our solution as a proposal for The Ministry of Employment and Economic Affairs to form a working group and collaboratively design a peer learning program with the help of our design tool.
Looking at TE-offices, KELA´s and municipalities civil servants, caseworkers, through the exercises at the DfG-course, storytelling, storyboarding and scenarios. From this work finding that appreciation could be the key of solving well-being issues and figuring out what kind of actions appreciation could be and how this can effect the reform and unemployment rate in Finland.
The blog shares the transition from the research phase towards exploring the design intervention in efforts for finding means to establish a dialogue from our primary stakeholder (biodiversity) through a project brief by Metsähallitus and the Ministry of the Environment.
This blog post explores our process of moving from the 3 main identified problem areas into some possible interventions. It is described how different frameworks allowed us to identify desired scenarios, in which learning happens collaboratively among peers rather than from a top-down approach. Some potential solutions are explored.
As a third update from the DfG course project, we will open our process working towards meaningful design intervention. Since the last post, we have moved from defining the problem to ideating the solution for improving the international jobseekers’ experience.
This blog post describes our process and steps of the last few weeks to get closer to our solution. We got inspiration in developing a design intervention that aims to improve shared understanding amongst Metsähallitus departments and preserve the biodiversity of national parks by applying the policy lab tool.
By forming our user scenario, we can find inspiration in developing nudges that serve to improve the visitor experience and protect the biodiversity of national parks. This method of working not only connects us to the problem area we look to solve but helps us to get closer to our design intervention.
Finnish design project provided by the Ministry of Finance focusing on solving the needs of the public servants (in Kela, TE offices and municipalities) involved in the transition from the 15 TE offices to 309+ municipalities due to the TE services reform 2024, via people-centric and public strategy renewal ideas.
These past two weeks we focused on unearthing challenges, triumphs and expectations with on-the-ground employees from different organisations which are a part of the TE2024 reform and identifying challenging areas where we can intervene. So far we have outlined three main problem segments that resurfaced often when discussing different reform activities.
Climate change is taking its toll on biodiversity everywhere but something lurking in the shadows of public media is the visitors’ contribution to biodiversity loss in national parks. Ideologies of systems thinking helped us to understand this spider legged topic further and eventually even led us to our problem area: Value of the guidelines is not realized by the visitors in relation to their impacts to biodiversity.
Team 1B is working on Metsähallitus’ and the Ministry of the Environment’s brief about the future of sustainable recreation. How can national parks be preserved in the future, as visitor numbers continue to grow? Through research and design interventions, the project seeks solutions to behaviors that harm the nature in conservation areas.
During the second phase of our project on the TE2024 reform, we mainly focused on analysing our interview data. The most important insight we gained is that international jobseekers have very specific needs during the different steps of their journey. How well these needs are being met translates back to their personal relation with the formal employment services.
This blog post reports how our second quarter of research has been done. We develop our research scope by focusing on the Uusimaa region, especially Nuuksio National Park and its neighboring forests. We looked up organizations that manage various types of regenerative and nature education activities for a wide range of the general public in the region. We evolved our direction of research that concentrates on Nature Education, Regenerative activities, and Sense of community after using different mapping tools. This blog will mainly report stakeholder and causal loop maps to describe our findings and what we understand at this stage.
How can we resolve the conflict between promoting visits and conserving biodiversity in Finnish National Parks? We are exploring the possibility of bridging different organisations in order to enhance regenerative activities in nature areas. In this blog, I will outline what we have done, what we grasped and what we will do so far.
This blog post reports on the work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by group 2C dealing with the Ministry of Finance’s brief … Read more
How to protect biodiversity in Finnish nature recreational areas from the increasing number of visitors? In this first blog, group 1A deep-dive in understanding the issues and finding insights with a human-centred approach through different stakeholders such as nature itself, Metsähallitus, The Ministry of the Environment, and Visitors.
What does a human-centered employment services reform look like? In this blog Group 2A reflects on their starting points on a journey to understand a government reform with all its stakeholders, and explores how applying a human-centered lens influences how we see both the bigger picture and details.
Finnish design project provided by the Ministry of Finance focusing on solving the needs of the public servants (in Kela, TE offices and municipalities) involved in the transition from the 15 TE offices to 309+ municipalities due to the TE services reform 2024, via people-centric and public strategy renewal ideas.
From understanding the project brief to unpacking sustainability into layers, and to finding in-depth research directions, we used human-centered approach to analyze motivations and challenges faced in the project by Metsähallitus and the Ministry of the Environment.
Blog IV – Reducing the carbon footprint of public procurement – Kela Maternity package Group 2A: Xinghua Meng, Kalle Kaisko, Michael Buchta from the Creative … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the brief on ‘Pilot project for Personal Budgeting Model’, … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the Ministry of Interior’s brief on ‘Strategy for … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the Ministry of Interior’s brief on ‘Strategy for … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment’s … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the brief on ‘Pilot project for Personal Budgeting Model’, … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by the group dealing with the Ministry of Interior’s brief on ‘Strategy for … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by the group dealing with the Ministry of Interior’s brief on ‘Strategy for … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by the group dealing with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by the group dealing with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the Ministry of Interior’s brief on ‘Strategy for … Read more
These blog posts report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The posts are written by groups dealing with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment’s … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post are written by the group dealing with the brief on ‘Pilot project for Personal Budgeting … Read more
This blog post reports on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by the group dealing with the Ministry of Interior’s brief on ‘Strategy … Read more