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.

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.

Creating something tangible for appreciation

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.

From topdown flow to peer collaboration

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.

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.

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.