Course on Societal Design
This Fall we launch again our award winning design course. This year with some major re-factoring: social impact & personal coaching. And also, online lectures due to the pandemic.
The new semester is here, and you have started to create plans for what to study this fall. We hope you seriously consider CS-E5280 Societal Design Project (9 cr).
Societal Design Project (SDP) is a revision of the Digital Service Design (DSD) that has run for 7 years and been rewarded practically every year as one of the best courses at Aalto’s CS department. Last year it was the best one.
Just like DSD, SDP focuses on strategic design of services for real client organisations.
During the course, students work in groups of 4–5 to create solutions for cases provided by 7 different client organisations. A key point of the course is to give students real projects, not academic exercises.
Cases & Clients
This year we have eight clients who have committed to helping each group on a weekly basis. The clients and their cases are:
Oura. “In this course, we want create a concept that has an effect on users’ daily routines, helping them make choices that lead their wellbeing in a direction that they themselves want to take it. When we talk to our users, one of the things that they really love about Oura is that it makes something that was previously invisible — their body signals and responses to their lifestyle — visible. We want to explore this ‘sixth sense’”.
LähiTapiola. “Our regional companies want to have their customers participate in making decisions about the company’s goodwill actions. What good we will do? How do they take part?”
City of Helsinki (digitalization & strategy department). “Our goal is that citizens of Helsinki, especially children, find meaningful things to do on their free time that somehow relates to culture; and especially in their own neighbourhood. How could this take children’s well-being forward? How can we get more people to have more hobbies that enable a meaningful life?”
Accountor. “We are looking for a concept that creates ways for our customers to benefit from our statistical data for them to better manage their business. In our database we have some 50 000 SME customers whose data we can use to create statistics, e.g. company revenue, company growth etc. benchmark data to own industry.”
Espoo City Theater. “We present performances that help people to understand changes in life globally, locally and in personal level. We are aiming to reach working people in English-speaking businesses in Keilaniemi area and students at Aalto University, who are non-existing customers at the moment and don’t know what we have to offer. We want to find a concept that improves their lives by offering a way to increase their cultural and societal capital and a sense of being a part of community.”
Finnish National Agency for Education (Opetushallitus). “Our goal in the course is for you to design a concrete, viable product, a tool, or a method that can be used in implementing the concept of “transversal competence” (i.e., multi-disciplinary competence, laaja-alainen osaaminen in Finnish) in upper secondary general education schools (lukiot in Finnish). In other words, the concept will be instrumental in making understandable and concrete the different meanings and representations of transversal competence, as well as showing how it can be found in or introduced into the school culture and pedagogy.”
Yle (Finnish Public Broadcasting Company). “In this course we are looking for a concept that would increase the personal relevance of Yle among those who feel excluded from or discriminated in Finland because of their background. One of Yle’s goals is to increase mutual understanding between people and give a voice to those who are otherwise invisible in public.”
For whom?
Whether your interests lay in code, organizational design, strategic consulting, service or UX design, data, or somewhere else, you will encounter situations where the creation of new concepts (innovation) is needed.
The course is compulsory for all master’s students in Information Networks (because you will all end up in multi-disciplinary teams). However, and importantly, we have a special quota for other master’s students as well! In the past years the ARTS and BIZ and other SCI students have been super important for the course, and have also enjoyed the course a lot.
You should have basic knowledge of design tools and thinking (e.g., the so-called SCI project course or similar). Also, it helps if you appreciate team work and interaction, and you believe that best results come from a diversity of backgrounds.
NOTE! The course is intensive and requires everyone to commit to a specific schedule (it is 9 credits, after all). That is the secret of the course’s long success: students actually commit to the team work and the client case. In other words, please don’t think about doing the course only during the weekends.
But don’t be scared! We truly try to make this course one of the best in whole Aalto (and we have a pretty good track record already :P ). That is why we put so much effort into teaching and coaching. For example, the whole teaching / coaching / client staff this Fall is as many people as the students themselves. Read further to see what we mean…
Personal Coach for Everyone
For each and every student there is a personal professional coach that helps the student to find their own role, skills, and style in multi-disciplinary team working on a strategic concept. This year the professional mentors come from Accenture, Nitor, Solita and Vincit. You will meet your coach three times at least: before, during, and after the team work.
Group Coach for Every Team
In addition to a personal coach, who helps you on a personal level, each team has a coach to help the team deliver the required work for the client. Also, each client organisation is committed to have a contact person weekly available and as a remote member of the team.
The team coaches consist of students and graduates who have done the course previously and have a really good understanding of what you are trying to achieve as a team.
Societal Impact through Strategic Design
The societal focus of the course is there to show that everything we create in the business context, happens also at a societal and environmental context. And now, as we are facing these huge societal changes, such as Covid-19, this kind of broad thinking that permeates the limits of business and society is more important than ever.
In practice, each client case has a strong societal dimension and this is also part of the design tools and process used in the course. In other words, you will learn how to bring social impact into the actual strategic thinking of your concept.
How do I get into the course?
The course in Oodi for you to register. It has hopefully all the information you need. Here are the facts about the course schedule:
Course starts Monday September 7th and ends in December. All lectures are mandatory.
- Lectures/workshops every Monday from 14:15 to 18:00ish in Zoom.
- Group meeting with team coach every Thursday (time to be arranged with each coach).
- Weekly meeting with your client (exact time to be arranged with your client).
- Additional team meetings (group work) on a weekly basis.
- At the moment, the course is going to be online. Each team and coach and client can arrange their own meetings in physical proximity as long as the rules for distancing are applied.
Feel free to share this blog post among all Aalto master’s students!
