The cosmic horror of Finnish bureaucratic iceberg

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.

Identifying the nuts and bolts of a large scale employment services reform

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.

Seeing the forest through the trees

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.

Finding tangible problems in a complex system

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.

A system based on the needs of international jobseekers

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.

Navigating through forests in the Uusimaa region while thinking about the broad spectrum of interests among the stakeholders

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.

Exploring deeper into the forests of Finland

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.

Getting comfortable with not knowing everything or designing for Finnish public services

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 on Orchestrating public governance in employment services (TE2024) by focusing on the public servants’ needs in the new reform model. The group includes Sanne van der Linden from Creative Sustainability … Read more

Healthy Nature, Healthy People

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.

Exploring the path to human-centered employment services

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.