Design for Government course in Design Museum's exhibition Enter and Encounter

The optimistic exhibition focuses on the future, asking how design challenges the present and shapes things to come.

Enter and Encounter is a joint exhibition produced by Design Museum Finland and the Finnish Association of Designers Ornamo, featuring contemporary design after Helsinki’s Design Capital Year of 2012. Aalto University's course Design for Government is nominated to take part in the exhibition!

The course 'Design for Government' is organised yearly at Aalto University since 2013, joining Finnish ministries together with multidisciplinary student teams to solve complex, policy-level challenges. The aim of the course is to introduce design as a strategic competence that can be applied in public sector decision-making. In the course, students apply empathic design approaches to identify stakeholder needs, systems approaches to analyze the wider context of policies, and behavioural insight to identify and design relevant solutions. Design for Government is at the frontier of design expansion into the public sector. It builds on a tradition of design ‘beyond the object’ – the design of processes, services, strategies and other immaterial products.

Design for Government has so far collaborated with 6 different ministries, and 70 alumni of the course span more than 11 disciplines and 4 universities. Ministry-commissioned projects range from addressing how building standards enable accessible and independent living and how the new national waste code should be enacted, to how agricultural production relates to the circular economy and nutrition at schools. Solutions created by students range from simplifying web services to rewriting policy documents. In the exhibition Enter and Encounter, the course and its objectives are displayed through a video documentary. The documentary depicts the various design activities in the course, student proposals and impacts from students’ and ministry perspectives.

Team: Taneli Heinonen, Seungho Lee, Hella Hernberg, Juha Kronqvist, Ramia Mazé; curatorial assistant Miina Pohjolainen and video documentary Roman Lihhavtshuk.

More info: http://www.designmuseum.fi/en/exhibitions/enter_and_encounter-2/