Accessible? Why Should You Need to Ask?

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.

Design? Probably. Human-centered? Not for now.

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.

Design and policy: where and when do they meet

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.

First diamond attempt: design for a dignified old age

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.

Designing a toolkit of acts of appreciation

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.

Good presenting is clear thinking made visible

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.

Coffee table for biodiversity

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.

Building an actionable case for peer learning

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.