The results from Inland’s spatial interventions

During the Fall of 2017 Inland placed a set of participatory posters in corridors and common spaces in Migri offices all around Finland. The goal of this spatial intervention was to inspire a participatory culture in Migri and collect ideas for future projects. Questions in the posters related to well-being at work, how service design is understood within Migri, and how it could benefit the units. Participants gave their vote by using stickers and they were encouraged to leave comments with sticky notes.

When we asked, “How can service design benefit our unit,” a culture of experimentation got the most votes from all units. Second and third place went for bringing new and comprehensive thinking to recurring problems and making the bottlenecks visible. Two bigger themes arose from the sticky notes: 1) ideas that related to different ways of organizing work and 2) increasing the human-centered approach. Additionally, participants identified the opportunity to unwrap and explain the term “service design” through examples.

I love this job, because…

When asked about factors creating well-being at work, most people responded great co-workers. The best colleagues got 68 votes, being in the top 2 in all units. Additionally, flexible workways, a nice boss and a chance to utilize personal skills got the majority of votes. Other important themes that arose from the free comments on sticky notes included: a versatile and challenging work environment, a nice work community and customers.

One of the posters asked participants to imagine a situation where they could freely organize their work in a new way. Altogether 50 ideas were collected from nine different units. Recurring comments regarded work-life balance, work-life cycles, spending casual time together with coworkers outside the office, and the importance of defining job descriptions and work goals. Different working habits of the specific units became visible in the two-by-two matrix, where the flexibility-rigidity of work was placed on the vertical axis and heaviness-lightness of workload on the horizontal axis.

The intervention results show that people in Migri are interested in a culture of experimentation. Sitra defines a ‘culture of experimentation’ as a social environment that encourages people to experiment and approves the characteristics of experimenting, such as the risk of failure (Berg A., Hilden M., Lahti K., 2014, Sitran selvityksiä 77, p.14). All of this is inline with the recent public discussions, as the government has recently started a key project on enhancing the culture of experimentation in all levels of society.

We in the service design team are glad to see that the posters were received well and we want to thank all the participants for their time and effort. As service designers we are inspired to see the interest towards a culture of experimentation and wish to support the future experiments and experimenters!

Read the previous post about spatial interventions here: https://medium.com/inland/spatial-interventions-why-12470c29b5e5

References:

Annukka Berg, Mikael Hildén ja Kirsi Lahti (2014) Kohti kokeilukulttuuria. Analyysi Jyväskylän resurssiviisaista kokeiluista strategisen kehittämisen työkaluina. Sitran selvityksiä 77. Retrieved 6.2.2018 from https://www.sitra.fi/julkaisut/kohti-kokeilukulttuuria/

Article author: Kristin Swan & Anna Kokki

Article contributor: Mariana Salgado