Browsing by Author "Saad-Sulonen, Joanna"

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  • (Challenges and opportunities of) documentation practices of self-organised urban initiatives
    (2018-10-01) Botero, Andrea; Saad-Sulonen, Joanna
     A3 Kirjan tai muun kokoomateoksen osa
    This chapter discusses the documentation practices of two citizen initiatives in Helsinki and the role of current social media infrastructures and artefact ecologies in supporting them. We point out how social media and other digital technologies are important catalysers in the initial steps of both endeavours, providing seeds for documentation practices to emerge. However, as practices stabilise and more information is accumulated, challenges related to access, effective archiving, reach and reuse, as well as the current business logic of social media platforms, start to appear. The chapter concludes with some implications for social media design and the structuring of participatory design processes, stating that reliance on social media is not enough, and that participatory design, if attuned to the notion of the construction of knowledge commons, offers interesting approaches to support the documentation challenges of self-organised urban initiatives.
  • Coaching designer’s mindset, Using a design thinking approach when developing the work practices 
of ‘non-designers’
    (2015) Neuvonen-Mulvie, Reetta-Leena
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
    Businesses are increasingly focused on creating innovations to create market disruption. Design is currently often regarded in the business domain as a provider for tools to foster and enhance innovation, especially from the customer perspective. Increasingly, professionals that are not trained as designers are pursuing to integrate designerly approaches and practices to their work as well as leading the innovation activities. This thesis lies on practical grounds at the intersection of design and business, where I embrace and make use of my professional design background as a way of coaching ‘non-trained designers’ operating in the business realm, in designer practices. The thesis looks for an answer to the following overarching research question: how to improve working practices related to innovation at the fuzzy front-end of product development? It discusses how design thinking in general, co-creation, and co-design ideas would benefit developing the fuzzy front end work practices, what it would entail to empower those not trained as designers to use these tools, and identify the challenges around these ideas. The thesis is based on a study pro-ject in which I engaged with the Suunto company, and their Consumer experience (CX) team, which is responsible for collecting customer and market insights, strengthening customer under-standing and practices across the company. CX team consists of eight non-trained designers. The study project was set to find solutions how to improve and clarify the existing daily working practices of the CX team around their ‘Consumer Exploration package development process’ using co-creative techniques. The outcomes of the study project were a method presentation, “Consumer Exploration Package (CXP) working method”, and its supporting toolkit to be used by non-trained designers, which are inspired from design thinking and co-creative design practices. The thesis concludes with a set of suggestions for teams operating at the fuzzy front end. The collaborative attitude and skills for co-creation are becoming increasingly important in designing solutions for our complex world. Developing innovating work practices at the fuzzy front end for non-trained designers is largely about applying a ‘designer mind-set’: this entails an empathic attitude towards the customer and a design approach that helps tackle problems creatively, as inspired by design thinking, co-design and management practices. Such an approaches makes it easier to trigger and nurture collaboration and meaning making processes between participants, but it is not problem free. To make use of a ‘designer mind-set’ and co-creative techniques requires diffused experience in design practices, which can be acquired by working closely with the design realm. Here, I emphasise the role of expert designers in ‘design coaching’ to improve the design practices in other domains, with and for other professionals.
  • COMBINING PARTICIPATIONS. Expanding the Locus of Participatory E‐Planning by Combining Participatory Approaches in the Design of Digital Technology and in Urban Planning.
    (2014) Saad-Sulonen, Joanna
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
    The thesis is a trans-disciplinary work on participatory e-planning. So far, participatory e-planning, as approached in the urban planning and e-planning fields, has only focused on conventional types of participation in urban planning, which are enhanced by the use of single pieces of software. This approach is not in tune with the realities of the emerging digital age and its emerging cultures of participation. These are cultures of information-centred and digitally mediated peer production and sharing that are supported by activities of tinkering with technology. I argue that in order to meet the realities of the digital age, participatory e-planning has to recognize the necessity of combining different types of participation. I particularly emphasize the importance of participation in the design of digital technology, which comprises different types of participation, such as staged participation and participation as design-in-use. By acknowledging participation in the design of digital technology, it becomes easier to understand and tap into the dynamics of the new cultures of participation, as well as face the challenges and uncertainties of the new technological landscape of mundane digital tools associated with it. The research questions that guide the work are the following: 1) How should we re-conceptualize participatory e-planning? and, 2) What and how should we design for participatory e-planning? The outcome is a work that introduces a mixed conceptual vocabulary and a novel analytical tool, the matrix of multiple participations. Participatory e-planning is re-conceptualised as comprising different types of participation that take place in urban planning, as well as in the design of digital technology. The different types of participation can occur simultaneously in different combinations and affect one another. My quest for a new conceptualization of participatory e-planning has emerged from and gone hand in hand with my involvement in the participatory design of the Urban Mediator (UM), an online map-based tool for locative media creation and sharing. The concrete participatory design of the UM gave impetus to the Expanded Participatory Design (EPD) approach, which combines different but interconnected activities of participation in the design of digital technology. The EPD can also be embedded in different types of participation in urban planning. The EPD approach expands the locus of participatory e-planning towards collaborative work based on digital media production and sharing by experts and non-experts alike.
  • The Design of Pseudo-Participation
    (2020-06-15) Palacin, Victoria; Nelimarkka, Matti; Reynolds-Cuellar, Pedro; Becker, Christoph
     A3 Kirjan tai muun kokoomateoksen osa
    Participation is key to building an equitable, realistic and democratic future. Yet a lack of agency in decision making and agenda-setting is a growing phenomenon in the design of digital public services. We call this pseudo-participation by and in design. The configuration of digital artifacts and/or processes can provide an illusion of participation but lack supportive processes and affordances to allow meaningful participation to happen. This exploratory paper examines the realm of pseudo-participation in the design of public digital services through two concepts: 1) pseudo-participation by design, digital interfaces, and tools that provide the illusion of participation to the people, 2) pseudo-participation in design, processes in which those affected by the design decisions are marginalized and not given any agency. We contribute to the re-imagination of participatory design in modern societies where the role of politics has become ubiquitous and is yet to be critically scrutinized by designers.
  • Design Opportunities and Challenges in Indian Urban Slums-Community Communication and Mobile Phones
    (2010) Singh, Abhigyan
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
    This thesis investigates the area of community communication for marginalized communities belonging to Indian urban slums. The aim of the thesis is to identify design challenges and opportunities for mobile based community communication services for residents of Indian urban slums. The thesis is based on two ethnographic field research done in urban slums of India. The research is qualitative in nature and is best identified as participatory bottom-up exploration. The research is grounded in the conceptual frameworks of Community Informatics, Communicative Ecology and Communities of Practices. The thesis discusses the existing practices of mobile phone's use amongst the residents of Indian urban slums, identifies the 'Human Nodes' in community communication at an Indian urban slums, presents design opportunities and challenges for community communication services for residents of Indian urban slums, and proposes a design concept called as 'Asynchronous Voice based Community Communication Service' for residents of Indian urban slums.
  • Designing for and with the 'Digital Citizen'
    (2024-07-01) Kirk, David S.; Boztepe, Suzan; Christiansson, Jörn; De Götzen, Amalia; Ehrenberg, Nils; Grönvall, Erik; Lawson, Shaun; Linde, Per; Saad-Sulonen, Joanna; Vlachokyriakos, Vasilis
     A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa
    Longstanding practices of participatory co-design have sought to engage communities in the development of shared resources, services, and technologies. However, approaches such as citizen-centered design and digital civics bring these design methods to bear on the development of digital technologies in support of civic and third sector organizations in particularly complex and rapidly changing socio-technical landscapes. Such endeavors frequently need to engage marginalized, under-served and hard to reach communities. In these design spaces, the 'Digital Citizen' becomes a contested concept, deserving of deeper exploration. In this one-day workshop we seek to bring together the DIS community, industry practitioners and third sector representatives to mutually explore the concept of the digital citizen, its boundaries, and opportunities, and in response to a rapidly changing environment of smart digital services, the ways in which design methods might be evolved to better support designing for and with these digital citizens.
  • Drawing Together, Infrastructuring and Politics for Participatory Design: a visual collection of cases, issues, questions, and relevant literature
    (2019) Botero, Andrea; Karasti, Helena; Saad-Sulonen, Joanna; Geirbo, Hanne Cecilie; Baker, Karen; Parmiggiani, Elena; Marttila, Sanna-Maria
     Commissioned report
    This e-zine documents the discussions and group work done at the ‘Infrastructuring in Participatory Design’ workshop, a full-day event that took place at the Participatory Design Conference 2018 in Hasselt and Genk, Belgium. Participants at the workshop came from a broad range of domains (e.g. Design, Science and Technology Studies, Anthropology, Social Sciences, Information Sciences, Architecture), representing interests in infrastructuring from multiple perspectives. The workshop invited the Participatory Design (PD) community to come together, with their cases or projects, questions and topics of interest in order to take stock of empirical insights and conceptual developments around the notions of infrastructure and infrastructuring, and their relevance to the revitalization of the political agenda of PD. Following a hands-on approach, participants – collectively and critically - mapped issues, disentangled assumptions, identified blind spots, and outlined new research opportunities charting the possibilities and limitations of an infrastructuring approach in Participatory Design at large.
  • Exploring E-Planning Practices in Different Contexts
    (2012) Wallin, Sirkku; Saad-Sulonen, Joanna; Amati, Marco; Horelli, Liisa
     School of Engineering | A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
    As planners and decision-makers experiment with information and communication technologies (ICTs),it’s important to explore and analyze these attempts in different planning systems and contexts. The aim of the article is to compare the use of and aspirations attached to e-planning in Helsinki, Finland and Sydney,Australia. This comparison will highlight the interrelationship between planning context and its amenability to an e-planning approach and shows there are shared themes in both cases: firstly, the complexity involved in reconciling the aims of the e-planning experiments and their connection to the planning process itself (roles,objectives, implementation of tools and processes). Secondly, the way that e-planning opens up cracks in the façade of administration, and thirdly, the ways in which e-planning provides possibilities to reshape existing planning procedures. The authors argue that the different planning and governance contexts affect the adoption of e-planning and this adoption is necessarily a selective process.
  • Exploring the desirable future of land use, through the balance of urban and environmental interests and tensions in a mid-sized city of a megadiverse country
    (2024-11-17) Escobar Molina, Valeria
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
    This thesis explores the balance between the expansion of the urban built environment and the protection and conservation of natural areas. There is an underlying tension between these two interests due to land being a finite resource. This is especially relevant for the city of Manizales in Colombia, where the research for this thesis takes place. Further contextual tensions that affect the balance between the natural and urban environment can be evidenced through a case study of an urban development project in the city. This development project was stopped due to legal measures taken by citizens. They demanded the fulfillment of collective rights, to ensure the protection and access to natural benefits from a forest reserve that the project was planning to build next to. The legal process is still active and unresolved at the time of this research. The use of the case study in this thesis is merely as a tool to uncover the multitude of actors, perspectives, motivations and interests that are active in the city and are relevant in the study of the balance between urban and natural environment. The case study is a representative snapshot of how and why the tensions in land use purposes arise in the city of Manizales. Some of the topics uncovered in the research were tensions that emerged from multiple sources like lack of land, the need of housing for citizens, economic gain as a motivation for urban expansion, the distrust of citizens towards decision making groups, the desire for environmental protection, the need for increased resilience for climate change mitigation, among others. There are a multitude of opinions on what the challenges for balance are and how they should be addressed. This thesis is a space for dialogue, enabled through the collection of different perspectives through interviews and workshops. Despite the different backgrounds of the participants, the core desires and hopes for the future mix to showcase a city where civility and wellbeing are at the forefront of the city’s evolution. It is the details and the approaches where the difference in perspectives take place. This thesis centers on the compilation of what the citizens speculate those futures could be like, through a participatory and collaborative process. To create a space where different perspectives can be combined to generate a proposal for what the city could become. Furthermore, it provides a tool to further develop the futures showcased in this research.
  • Mediaattori – Urban Mediator A hybrid infrastructure for neighborhoods
    (2005) Saad-Sulonen, Joanna
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
    This design research project investigates the area of designing at the boundaries of digital and physical urban space. Its aim is to present cities with a direction for the future that addresses the possibilities presented by the interweaving of new digital technologies and urban space, for empowering people in shaping their own city. The approach followed is not technologically driven but rather takes people’s everyday practices (de Certeau 1984) as the grounding point for the investigation. The design process is built upon dialogues with people and the urban environment as a way of gaining understanding of urban everyday practices and designing in harmony with them. The resulting design concept, Urban Mediator, illustrates a local and people-centered perspective for our urban futures. It proposes a hybrid infrastructure for urban neighborhoods. This combined digital and physical framework gives people the possibility to engage in improving the quality of their everyday urban environments and their experience of these environments. The concept, presented through scenarios, is developed as a working tool for catalyzing discussion between different stakeholders that would be involved in a future proposal for collaborative design for cities. The thesis has been produced under the umbrella of the ARKI research group, at the Media Lab of the University of Art and Design.
  • New Approaches to Urban Planning - Insights from Participatory Communities
    (2013) Horelli, Liisa (editor); Jarenko, Karoliina; Kuoppa, Jenni; Saad-Sulonen, Joanna; Wallin, Sirkku
     School of Engineering | D4 Julkaistu kehittämis- tai tutkimusraportti tai -selvitys
    The new approaches to urban planning, such as participatory time and e-planning, comprise methods that allow us to analyse, develop, implement and monitor physical, functional and participatory structures at the neighbourhood level and beyond. They enable models of planning that may bring about an architecture of opportunities. This means the building of a supportive infrastructure of everyday life that encourages citizens to participate not only in formal decision-making, but actually in the co-design and co-production of their own local environment, on the basis of daily and future activities, at different scales.
  • On DIY Cloth Face Masks and Scalar Relationships in Design
    (2021-08) Saad-Sulonen, Joanna; Botero, Andrea; Rosendahl Hansen, Mille
     A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa
    In this paper, we take the case of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) face masks as an entry point to questions of scale and scalar relations in design. We provide two example scalar trajectories that illustrate how DIY face masks - as everyday design artefacts - are in continuous shaping and re-shaping through various forms of active use and design. We also point out how scalar relations manifest in knowledge sharing and circulation of know-how, as DIY masks emerge in a world facing the same COVID-19 virus but within different local realities and relationships.
  • PDC Place Nordic: participatory design in/for the digitalization of public services
    (2022-08-19) De Götzen, Amalia; Starostka, Justyna; Saad-Sulonen, Joanna; Ehrenberg, Nils; Linde, Per
     A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa
    Public libraries are more and more recognized to become partners in co-design and technology education, also aiming to bridge the digital divide. We see it as a great opportunity to expand the roles of public libraries even further, engaging citizens in co-design processes, improving existing public e-services and co-designing new services. That shift requires new roles taken by librarians, but also new processes, as well as new methods of development of e-services in the public sector. In PDC Place Nordic we explore this new role of libraries in participatory future making, engaging librarians, academics, practitioners, and different local communities. Events will take place in Copenhagen, Malmö, and Helsinki/Espoo.
  • Relationality, commoning, and designing
    (2022-08-19) Poderi, Giacomo; Marttila, Sanna Maria; Saad-Sulonen, Joanna; Van Amstel, Frederick M.C.; Teli, Maurizio; Tonolli, Linda; D'Andrea, Vincenzo; Botero, Andrea
     A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa
    This workshop explores and reflects upon both how relational ontologies can support design processes that target commons and commoning as outcomes, and how commons and commoning can work as speculative lenses for the understanding of relationality in Participatory Design. Here, we invite the PD community to engage with questions such as: how do we embrace and rely upon relationality when designing collectively and in a participatory manner within more-than-human ensembles? How do we become commoners and what do we nurture in common? What do we lose and what do we gain by considering commons with a keen eye on relationality? Which kind of relational qualities are essential for commoning design and designing commons? In short, "Relationality, commoning, and designing"aims to be a venue for critically supporting alternative and more sustainable futures for all (not only humans) by means of participatory designing and commoning.
  • Scalar trajectories in design: The case of DIY cloth face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic
    (2023-01-23) Botero, Andrea; Saad-Sulonen, Joanna
     A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
    The article examines an artefact of everyday design – the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) cloth face mask employed against respiratory infections – to interrogate scale and scalar relationships. This lens reveals new perspectives on how practice-based design research can mobilize scale in more nuanced ways. The authors propose that DIY face masks, as artefacts of mundane design engagements both with material (cloth and thread) and with sharing of knowledge (about design, craft and practice), globally and within local networks and communities, direct our attention to scale as a matter of relations, engagements and emergent trajectories. Through empirically led exploration combined with approaching making as sensemaking, the article highlights the multiplicity of design artefacts emerging in DIY mask design spanning several scales and introduces the notion of scalar trajectories across multiple design engagements.
  • A SoftGIS Revision: Towards Digitally Mediated Locative Dialogue in Support of Urban Planning
    (2012) Jacobsen, Sara
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
    This thesis presents an iterative design process beginning from assessment of an existing online map-based interface. The process draws from co-design concepts to determine interactions that could compliment current use of the online interface. Inspiration also comes from ethnographic practices and previous research that merges topics of technology and ethnography. The resulting interface proposal extends use of the existing interface beyond information gathering to support ongoing communication. This is accomplished through a two-fold strategy incorporating both revision to the visual design of the interface and recommendations for complimentary interactions in mobile, real-world contexts.
  • Unesco Young Digital Creators: Educator’s Kit
    (2006) Leinonen, Teemu; Saad-Sulonen, Joanna; Salmi, Anna
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | D5 Oppikirja, ammatillinen käsi- tai opaskirja tai sanakirja
  • The Urban Information Toolkit: Enabling collaborative work around issues related to urban everyday life
    (2014) Laakso, Neea; Saad-Sulonen, Joanna; Botero, Andrea
     School of Arts, Design and Architecture | D4 Julkaistu kehittämis- tai tutkimusraportti tai -selvitys
    The aim of the Urban Information Toolkit is to provide inspiration or facilitate collaboration inside heterogeneous groups of people that are interested in urban data and information. In this publication, we give an overview of our motivation to come up with such a toolkit, which is very much linked to our desire to bring forward the need for a citizen-centered approach to smart cities. We also explain the methods we have used to develop The toolkit, and report an example of a concrete application context where we used the toolkit as part of a workshop in Helsinki in autumn 2013. We conclude with proposals for ways the Urban Information Toolkit can be integrated to activities of companies and municipalities interested in the topic of urban information and collaboration with citizens. This work has been supported by the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation TEKES (through the Kaupunkitieto ja toiminnan hallinta project, KaToHan) and the Aalto Media Factory (through the Urban Media Prototyping project, UMPro).
  • Visualizing Devices for Configuring Complex Phenomena in-the-Making
    (2021-09-15) Karasti, Helena; Botero, Andrea; Saad-Sulonen, Joanna; Baker, Karen
     A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
    STS scholars are engaging in collaborative research in order to study extended socio-technical phenomena. This article participates in discussions on methodography and inventive methods by reflecting on visualizations used both internally by a team of researchers and together with study participants. We describe how these devices for generating and transforming data were brought to our ethnographic inquiry into the formation of research infrastructures which we found to involve unwieldy and evolving phenomena. The visualizations are partial renderings of the object of inquiry, crafted and informed by 'configuration' as a method of assemblage that supports ethnographic study of contemporary socio-technical phenomena. We scrutinize our interdisciplinary bringing together of visualizing devices - timelines, collages, and sketches - and position them in the STS methods toolbox for inquiry and invention. These devices are key to investigating and engaging with the dynamics of configuring infrastructures intended to support scientific knowledge production. We conclude by observing how our three kinds of visualizing devices provide flexibility, comprehension and in(ter)ventive opportunities for study of and engagement with complex phenomena in-the-making.
  • Volunteer-based IT Helpdesks as Ambiguous Quasi-Public Services - a Case Study from Two Nordic Countries
    (2022-10-08) Christensen, Camilla; Ehrenberg, Nils; Christiansson, Jörn; Grönvall, Erik; Saad-Sulonen, Joanna; Keinonen, Turkka
     Conference article in proceedings
    In this case study we take a Nordic perspective on the tension between increased digitalisation of public services and the insufficient support for citizens with limited digital literacy. Volunteer-based IT helpdesk services in public libraries have emerged as an attempt to address this tension. Drawing on examples of volunteering in public library-based IT helpdesk services in two Nordic countries, this paper considers the IT helpdesks as quasi-public services. Based on interviews, observations and workshops, we explore: the work of IT helpdesk volunteers, the characteristics of helpdesk services offered, and the implications of these services being offered by volunteers. The services offered are of acceptable quality to the users while the ambiguity and lack of institutional support is making the service fragile. In spite of the challenges of the quasi-public IT helpdesk service we also note how it offers a potential platform for the co-design and support of new public services. Camilla Christensen and Nils Ehrenberg are shared first authors.