PROJECTS
Digital inequality in smart cities (disc, 2020–2025)
The project is funded by the Research Council of Finland (Academy Research Fellowship), and it studies urban digitalization and smart city development with the concept of digital inequalities. By digital inequality, we refer to disparities in citizens’ digital capability including access, use and understanding. DISC is executed in collaboration with Helsinki and Espoo, the two largest cities of Finland. It is based on design anthropological approach meaning that it creates new knowledge but also new ideas, concepts, and applications.
DISC aims to understand how city inhabitants experience digital inequality in cities that are executing urban digitalization intensively and are building smart city districts. Further, it explores profound ways to enhance digital equality, i.e. it searches for new ways and principles for creating smart cities.
IMAGINING SUSTAINABLE DIGITAL FUTURES (2022–2025)
The project 'Imagining sustainable digital futures: Outlines for eco-digital citizenship' (Research Council of Finland postdoc project 2022-2025) highlights the ecologically and socially adverse effects of digitalisation in society and the often unheard voices of young people. In the project, Dr. Minna Vigren develops methods to imagine alternative digital futures.
The method experiments include e.g. using creative methods from making images of desirable futures with an AI image generator and organising a movie series on alternative futures to leading workshops on design fiction. Furthermore, the concept of eco-digital agency is developed. It is academically alluring as it seeks to increase our awareness of the sustainability of our digital everyday lives and help the citizens - but also more broadly institutions, developers, and regulators - to make more sustainably mindful choices. The developed speculative and transformative methods for imagining will be disseminated beyond academia with the help of media education, culture, and youth organisations.
The project takes a critical, socio-technical approach with the aims to (1) develop eco-digital agency as an interdisciplinary concept; (2) explore how young European adults manage the impacts of their digital everyday life; and (3) experiment and develop creative methods that foster imaginings, aspirations, and actions which in turn help to make better digital futures for all. In doing so, the study combines broken world thinking, terrestrial thinking, and infrastructure theory.
Picture created with Wombo Dream. Prompt: Imagination of a sustainable digital future.
Designing Inclusive & Trustworthy Digital Public Services for Migrants in Finland (Trust-M, 2022–2025)
Trust-M is a consortium project funded by the Strategic Research Council of Finland, as a part of SHIELD programme. Many migrants may not find digital public sector services to be accessible, inclusive or trustworthy. For better immigrant integration, Finnish public sector has to engage with migrants in an inclusive and fair manner. Therefore, Trust-M specifically aims to understand how trust, inclusion and equality are present in current digital public sector services from a migrant perspective. It will create alternatives for novel digital public sector services that could upkeep trust and respect human rights.
One of the main migrant groups of interest is migrant women, since they have been considered particularly vulnerable to segregation from the labor market. Together with the city of Espoo, Trust-M will produce a pilot version of a hybrid public sector service based on conversational interaction, including conversational chatbots.
To do this, the researchers within Trust-M will conduct ethnographic research and participatory design with migrant counseling service programs in the Cities of Espoo and Helsinki as well as with many other public and third-sector actors. Trust-M will design and pilot digital services using hybrid service design based on conversational chatbots and speech-based interaction. We will assess the implications and devise metrics for offering more accessible and trustworthy services for diverse migrant users.
Scrutiny of strategy tools and methods in critical transdisciplinarity (CO-HOW, 2022–2024)
Co-How is one of the four Aalto University funded Radical creativity projects. It conducts pragmatist analysis and intends to development transdisciplinary strategy tools; further, it explores experimental and speculative collaboration methods. Transdisciplinarity is understood mainly as the combination of academic and practitioners’ activities in creative production. The overarching goal is to advance societally transformative creativity.