#SDAHelsinki
In November 2018, through an Erasmus+ funded Mobility Project, the Service Design Academy staff from Dundee & Angus College :
Caron Sandeman, Business Systems Development Manager
Katie Bain, Development Officer
Jo McNicoll, Part Time Lecturer
Chris Muir, Part Time Lecturer
travelled to Helsinki. This collaborative article details the trip – where we went, who we met and what we learned. We’d like to thank Micholla Finnegan from the College’s International Team for arranging the visit for us.
A Grid is a startup hub and one of Europe’s largest centres for growth companies. It is part of the Aalto University and located on campus. We met with Ville Luukkanen, who works for Aalto’s Business Research & Innovation Services. Ville gave us a guided tour of their open office spaces, followed by discussions around entrepreneurship, culture, opportunities for learning and student initiatives. Aalto promote student entrepreneurship through education and co-curricular activities. 50% of startups that originate from universities come from the Aalto communities.
MIT has rated Aalto’s ecosystem as one of the top 5 rising stars in the world. Student led entrepreneurial activities are funded through a student membership fee (the only fee paid for education) paid by every student, giving student entrepreneurs a considerable fund for projects and innovation. Aalto’s is Europe’s largest and most active student-run entrepreneurship community. Aalto has started a significant movement by founding major concepts such as Slush and Junction. Slush is the focal point for start-ups and tech talent to meet with top-tier international investors, executives, and it has become a world-renowned start-up event attracting over 20,000 participants and 2000 startups from around the world annually. Junction is a meeting point for thousands of developers, designers and entrepreneurs from around the world with people from 86 countries taking part.
We met in the design space which was the birth place of the DX200 scalable telecommunications platform which was purchased by Nokia and Rovio the creators of Angry Birds.
We met with Elise Rehula, Service Designer and Päivi Hietanen, City Design Manager, Helsinki City Lab.
Päivi and Elise explained the design revolution in Helsinki types of projects they tackle eight agencies they are partnering with challenges and difficulties they have faced in running over 200 City projects (2016–18)
Their aim to become the most functional city in the world based on the Nordic model of high quality city services, transparent governance, and almost non-existent corruption. “Liveability”* stems from the clean and safe urban environment of Helsinki, a unique cultural scene, empowerment of communities and perhaps, most importantly, a feeling of trust between the citizens.
There have been major projects using service design in : culture and leisure, administration, education, health care and the built environment. Helsinki lab are a platform for knowledge, sharing and learning using D3
The main education project, phenomenon based learning, is a scaffold for future education services. In a supportive environment, subjects are mixed and courses are designed collaboratively. They are exploring ‘School as a Service’ and shared resources whereby school pupils share the university campus. More about this later.
Elise joined us to visit Futurice, one of the agencies partnered with Helsinki Lab and the City to deliver Projects, there are 8 partner organisations. There we met with Nelly, Mia and Olly who spoke about the company’s culture of sharing knowledge.
We were welcomed with fruit smoothies and chocolate and introduced to Futurice in 10 seconds as Tech, Design, Business, Analytics, Advisory!!
We heard about “Future Fridays” where team members present ideas, problems and learnings.
Most of the designers are based in client’s businesses during projects, being onsite benefits everyone involved. Futurice Helsinki is based in the downtown area and they have an exciting and fun open space for people to get together, full of inspirational posters, quirky things, work spaces and comfy seating. Staff are encouraged to meet in the office on a Friday morning.
The staff wall faces everyone on arrival – this helps for visitors and new staff. It’s on paper, it’s not fancy but it does the job it was designed to do!
Knowledge is shared through Tribes (not Teams) and Tribe Leaders are appointed because of their specialist knowledge/competency, not because of their organizational position. Tribes meet on Future Fridays and then a series of events take place – these can be problem based, knowledge transfer, ideation, anything really and you can stay with your tribe or join another for these meetings if the subject matter is of particular interest to you.
People are treated as people and there is implicit trust from day one, HR is Human Care (people are not resources) and everyone has a company credit card. The smoothies we had were purchased on this, Nelly thought it would be a nice welcoming gesture and one that would make us remember our Futurice visit. It did, and they were delicious!
They use a 3 x 2 decision making policy taking account of Our People, Customer’s People and Time Spent x Now and the Future. This is a simple framework on which decision are made and can be justified and challenged.
They actively promote future growth in geographical areas through sending people to work in different countries and finding a customer to start the business there.
They have produced an open source book Lean Service Creation containing business focused canvases – the what, the how and the why. We received a copy for the Academy and shared SDA canvases through the SDA Staff Toolkit which they were impressed with and in some cases had not seen before. Throughout the day we were able to share the SDA journey and our experiences to date and gain examples of how we could share our work to encourage participation in College and with businesses looking to work with us in future.
Wednesday kicked off at the Aalto Design Factory who are an experimental learning and co-creation platform for education, research and application of product design. They are open 24/7 with one third open space, one third prototyping space and one third lectures, workshops and meeting rooms. Experimenting, prototyping and testing are design factory methods for realising ideas. Annually they run about 40 courses with 1500 students, 35+ industry partners and 10 in-house companies. We toured the facilities with Irana.
They work with high schools to provide 2-week work experience opportunities for the school pupils and they have also created a minor programme on top of the two main courses that they run, where teachers/lecturers collaborate to create course content and share good practice.
Design Factory activities have spread around the globe! Design Factory Global Network members operate based on the same philosophy and principles and provide familiar DF-environment for their local community.
The goal is to be the leader in international university collaboration beyond academic boundaries.
The Design Factory work with sponsored briefs to provide students with an immersive and practical experience similar to that in the real world of work. The course programmes are offered to students of other universities through the Design Factory Global Network so teams can be working with students from across the globe.
The projects are as true to real life as they can be, with project managers, deadlines and financing, all within a safe environment. The building is a cleverly designed and modular, adaptive to change and completely flexible. They also support other university departments and staff to be experimental in their approaches. Being the hub of product development in Aalto University, Design Factory doesn’t just teach design thinking, but also employs it its day to day operations and planning.
The core of the interior space can be modified according to the needs of different individuals, tasks or phases of work. By observing how the facilities are used, they are able to recognise current and future needs that support the Design Factory user experience.
There are kitchen facilities shared by staff and students and an inviting, almost like home, kitchen table and chairs. Everyone is responsible for cleaning the areas they use and the message to ‘tidy up’ are reinforced in fun ways.
The staff board is in this area and it contains a picture with details about that person, their name, contact details, area of work and their skills. The whole atmosphere is one of a family living and sharing a space rather than an academic institution and it works well.
The Väre building opened this year and has open public facilities on its lower floors, with more private work spaces on its upper floors, it houses the faculties of Art, Design and Architecture and it was here that we met with Professor Ramia Mazé, from the Design Practices Department who leads on the Design for Government course at Aalto University. There are two other service design based courses, Designing for Services and Public Sector Hackathon. On the Designing for Services course, projects are commissioned and courses are project based. Public Sector Hackathon covers digital based service delivery in the public and private sector.
The Design for Government students work on briefs provided by Ministries. Ramia shared the course schedule, contents, assignments and student work. The course has an intake of 105 students per year from 24 countries, it brings together together multi-discipline teams over the 10-week course. They use empathic approaches and behavioral insights mixed with systems approaches for ideation, actions and insights. Communication, problem framing, storytelling and the ability to argue, justify and present their final presentations are covered within the course. Course benefits and impacts are;
- Specialised competences and practical experience
- Problem based learning and practical work
- New perspectives
- Hands on experience of design, design tools and processes
- Proposals that may impact working practices and strategies
- Multi-perspectives from the multi-disciplinary teams
- Students are taught to tackle the upstream problems rather than focus on the downstream effect i.e Waste vs Upkeep, Repair vs Recycle. Student findings are presented at a public event.
“We do not educate for consultancy; we educate to embed” said Ramia. “There is quite a lot of mess around the course which, of course, is ok.”
Following our meeting with Ramia, we were given a guided tour around the Väre building, the newest building on Aalto Campus by Hanna Karkku the Planning Officer for the new build. The building brings together the Art, Design and Architecture. It is a spactaular building with open plan areas, state of the art workshops and study areas.
Thursday began with a meeting with Kirsi Verkka, Development Manager from the City’s Chief Executive Office. Kirsi has a background in design in education and introduced us to a few of the projects she has worked on :
Design Paths for Schools : the new national curriculum adopted at Finnish comprehensive schools in the autumn of 2016 which emphasizes collaborative development of education in ways that students, parents and guardians and the entire school network joins teachers in the planning and execution of learning. The methods and processes of design provide a productive foundation for collaborative development of learning. The Design Paths for Schools is a 7 step guide to using design in education developed with an external service design agency to support phenomenon based learning.
EduLab is a semester-based, full-time pre-incubator + incubator programme supporting the creation of prototypes, products and start-ups targeting the global education technology industry. It is a co-creative space for internal projects and workshops. The Finnish curriculum encourages children and parents to be involved with the development of their own curriculum and personal learning journey. EduLab is very much about experimenting together. They have developed a ‘how to make experiments work’ worksheet and run co-creation workshops where pupils drive the process.
OmaStadi is the participatory budgeting framework using a plan, participate and influence approach. This involves civil servants, citizens and designers collating together to identify common needs and areas of development within the city. A service blueprint has been created to explain the project to lay persons. They have aligned their processes to their design drivers to act as a checklist and guidance.
The department have also created motivation based user profiles to help keep citizens at the forefront of their developments. They just launched the website for citizens to contribute ideas to what should be included in the participatory budgeting agenda following a design jam and workshops with citizens and civil servants.
Next, we met with Pia Rantanen to discuss the Helsinki Design Manual. The purpose of Helsinki Design Manual is to guarantee the quality and consistency of public urban environment and to improve economic efficiency in Helsinki. The manual outlines a visually coherent and recognisable look for public outdoor spaces in Helsinki that is both attractive and long-lasting. The manual is to be used as reference in the design of public street spaces and green areas and, where applicable, in the design of partially public spaces. The core idea of Helsinki Design Manual is to create high-quality urban environment for the residents of Helsinki to live, move and work in.
This is a portal to share knowledge easily across the city. It was created to allow the 17 city departments to share knowledge and guidelines to strengthen the city identity. The previous data was held on paper and expensive to maintain resulting in an unaesthetic city scape. The digital handbook and tools is used by decision makers, suppliers, citizens and entrepreneurs. The project started 5 years ago using service design tools and methods to run 8 workshops with consultancy offices and over 100 specialist in different fields. The Wordpress site is the preferred solution to create a ‘sense of Helsinki’ and contains guidelines around materials, colours and shapes which are being used to ensure a strong sense of identity for the city going forward.
The Urban Academy is a new strategic collaboration platform and network between the City of Helsinki, University of Helsinki and Aalto University that combines interdisciplinary research, education and city development within the fields of urban research, planning and design. The network also supports and creates interdisciplinary research projects focusing on the topical urban questions and challenges in the Helsinki Capital Region.
The vision for the Urban Academy cooperation is to co-create a better, more sustainable and attractive city together. Through URBAN ACADEMY collaboration they are hoping to achieve higher quality of research and teaching and more relevant research for the benefit of the whole region. The goal is also to learn from each other: researchers and students will learn how the city works and the city officials will learn how to use and implement academic research better.
They deliver research projects, workshops, lectures and meet ups to encourage high quality research with impact including urban renewal, eco-residential areas and urban food systems. In a groundbreaking project, they have used school pupils as urban researchers using the city as a classroom to review walkablity and liveability. Their hot talk lectures are open to staff, students and citizens and focus on topics within the City Strategy eg carbon neutral city, digitalisation and urban life and urban inequality. A Masters Programme in Urban Study and Planning is a joint development between Aalto and Helsinki universities covering Plans, People and Systems with a focus around challenge based learning.
We had free time on the third day of our Helsinki Visit and visited the newly opened Amos Rex Museum in the centre of Helsinki. This seemed an obvious choice for a group visiting from another UNESCO City of Design which has a newly opened museum in the centre – the V&A Dundee.
The museum is below ground and it’s opening exhibition is by Tokyo based teamLab who strive to believe that art can span digital and the exhibitions are simply stunning. Adults and children alike were enthralled with the hypnotic living sea scape, the massless night sky exhibit and best of all the natural garden within black coated walls, floor and ceiling which when walked on or touched bring to life all the wonders of nature. The team had a great time here, the perfect place to relax after a busy and thought provoking three days.
We were even able to draw our own SDA branded crocodile which we coloured in, it was scanned and then you watched it appear on the walls and you could follow it around the rooms – so much fun!!
On our final day we visited an Insight, Strategy and Design Agency who work with the city on their projects, Kuudes.
. Kuudes is a multi-disciplinary team of forty creatives in Finland and Sweden. They use service design methods and take a collaborative approach in everything they do – with their clients and with the target audience. They are well known for their award-winning design work. People remember their visual identities, interiors, digital design, service design and packaging.
All their work is built on exceptional insight into the changing emotions and needs of the consumer. They work together with their clients to forge insight and discover new opportunities that can transform brands and businesses. They use service design methodologies and their expertise covers all sectors and marketing disciplines. They believe that great design needs insight and strategy to drive it, regardless of technology, channel or context.
They have 42 employees of 9 nationalities and an average age of 33. They’ve won 21 Awards and completed 50 projects since launching in 2004.
The data from their studies in both Sweden and Finland provide them with findings that with the expertise of their insights team can be customized to different branches, brands, products and services.
They have a solid knowledge on how to implement data from their Informed Consumer studies.
Rosie, Matte and Katariina outlined projects they had delivered including:
How to brand a city : One Hel of an Impact
The city branding project was designed to ensure that Helsinki’s brand concept and marketing strategy would seamlessly support each other.
Digital Immigration Services: Moving to Helsinki welcome guide.
This is a step-by-step guide to help people moving to/or thinking about moving to Helsinki to understand the immigration process. It also explains which public authorities you need to contact before and/or upon arrival.
What is ‘science as a service?’
Think Corner is a service concept that combines collaborative working and world-class academic discourse.
The concept for the new Think Corner was created by Kuudes in close collaboration with the university and its key stakeholders over a year-long development project.
Kuudes explained the Design Process for this project :
They uncovered the latent needs of different target groups, such as researchers, students, business people and city dwellers. They explored physical and digital opportunities for connecting with science in new ways. By combining credible, academic content with a collaborative way to operate, visitors will arrive and depart from Think Corner inspired and an idea or a thought richer. Their aim is to increase the use of academic content in learning, working, business, society, events, hobbies, media, travelling and networking. Think Corner is the inspiring home and an open community for insight and thinking in Helsinki.
It opened up the University of Helsinki to the public. With government funding decreasing there was a need for public donations and corporate sponsorship and an opportunity was required to enable income through different channels. The public can walk in and sit in on lectures, they have an event space that is fully booked for the next 18 months and in the first year the Think Corner has attracted half a million visitors.
Our visit to Helsinki concluded with lunch with Elise and Päivi, it was an opportunity for us to thank them for the time they spent with us and in co-ordinating the visit, to reflect on and share our experiences, and to ensure we had contact details for the future!!
Team Takeaways …….
“I liked the inclusive nature of all sectors, that all citizens worked together to create a better city with a strong identity. They had no fear or trepidation about trying new things, they trusted the process and more importantly trusted each other. This openness and trust enables them to work together to co- design a better city and a better life for all. I learned that trust, communication, co-operation and openness to new processes and ways of working is essential for success.” Jo
“I loved my Helsinki experience so much …. I wrote a blog about it!” Katie
“Helsinki is around 8–10 years ahead of Dundee (and Scotland) in terms of the design of services and I can see so much potential for how we can continue to change, through insights, collaborations and partnerships. We’ve brought back experiences and examples which have the potential to allow us to discover new opportunities that can transform services and businesses and inform and educate both in the College, through the Service Design Academy, in the city and Scotland.” Caron
“There is so much that is special and memorable about Helsinki. The passion of the people we met for what they are doing and they’re willingness to work together to improve the City for the people who live, work and play there. They show how the city and its people can make great things possible.” Chris
This piece has been a collaborative effort from the SDA team, written as a diary (as such) over the course of our experience. Some of it written it local cafes, a pub or two and the airport as well as taking time to reflect on our experience and absorb the unforgettable learning adventure we were so lucky to journey through together.
