From overload to charging — Getting used to upstream thinking

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.

From Voices to Action: Rethinking Elderly Participation

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.

Helsinki — A Great Place to Die?

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.

Tomorrow Together

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.

Life Event Services for a Dignified Old Age

Project Description The Finnish Ministry of Finance has launched the Digitalisation and automation of life events and business events program to use life events as the new structure and mindset to digitalize public services and address the 2030 Digital compass (Digikompassi) goals. The program aims to define and digitalise approximately 40 of the most significant life event … Read more

Reframing retirement: a life-long journey punctuated by a series of milestones

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.

Dignified retirement: standardizing services for a seamless transition

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.