I wrote a book with my dear colleague in the National University of Singapore, JJ Lee. ‘New Design Tools’ provides a comprehensive overview and in-depth guidelines on how to design for and with people. The book takes a deeper look into user research methods beyond the current wave of ‘design thinking’ or ‘design toolkits’. You will discover the origins, core principles, mindsets, step-by-step guidelines and real-life cases of the five essential tools, which are archetypes of most popularly used design research methods in emerging fields like Service Design, Experience Design and Design for Social Innovation.

The five essential tools include Design Ethnography (observation), Probes (dialogue), Co-design Workshops (collaboration), Affinity Diagram (interpretation) and Persona (application). The book offers an important message: that at the end of the day, what makes a design method work is the designers’ competence and flexibility rather than a method itself.

Learn more about the book at the dedicated website.

I have recently started writing for Design Press, a joint venter between Monthly Design and Naver. Although most of the writing is in Korean, some of them will be made available also in English on my Medium page.

> Medium page

I wrote a piece for a Korean media, Slownews, in an attempt to discuss the connection between the welfare state and economic performance of Finland, i.e. Nordic model. Pursuing welfare state has been a hot debate in South Korea – whether it works or not, the benefits and pitfalls. Not surprisingly, the opposing side take examples such as Volvo and Nokia as the failure of welfare state. My story line goes: yes, Nokia went bad, but we still have Fiskars, Suunto, Wärtsila, Kone, Supercell (of Clash of Clans), Rovio (of Angry Birds) … and countless innovations (like Linux) thanks to welfare state that provides fertile ground for healthy and smart people.

The article is here (in Korean).

I have recently helped Monthly Design, the design magazine with the longest history in Korea, to realise a special issue entitled ‘Design for Government’, the same name as the course I founded in Aalto University in Finland. The issue introduces 5 cases from Chile, USA, UK, Denmark and Finland as well as recommendable books and some organisations to watch for those who want to work in this emergent field of design.

I would like to thank Chelsea Mauldin of Public Policy Lab, Justin Cook, Tuula Sjöstedt and Jukka Noponen of Sitra, Jakob Schjørring of MindLab, Francesca Moroni and Juan Ignacio Cerda ‎of Elemental, Tom Loosemore of Public Digital for their generous help, as well as the co-writers of this text (to whom I thank in Korean).

The special issue can be found here (in Korean).

Joonas Widenius is my neighbour. I thought he was a enthusiast or hobbyist when I first saw him with his guitar and baby pram last year when we just moved in, but it turns out he is one of the rising guitarist and composer of Finland.

One day after work, I returned home and my wife told me that she heard some Paco de Lucía songs from above or the next flat, which sounded not like from a CD or through speakers. Widenius probably was doing a small practice that day. Now that I am a hug fan with two albums from iTunes, I get all excited when I see him walking up or down the stairs.

I was invited to give a talk at the Sint-Lucas Faculty of Architecture, KULeuven in Ghent, Belgium, on 28 October 2013. The title was “Meat and Sustainability: Trojan Horse and Dark Matter”, in which I have shared my look on strategic design and sustainability through the lens of beef production and consumption worldwide and in Finnish context. The content of the talk included problem framing in design, soft paternalism and systems thinking.

The talk was opened by Koen Meersman who leads IA Matters, the Interior Architecture Community at Sint Lucas School of Architecture, and Kris Scheerlink, the program director of the master programmes at Sint Lucas School of Architecture, as it was a joint conference of those two programmes. Sint-Lucas is the oldest and the best architecture school in Belgium, and I was honoured to be there to share my experience.

I have been invited to the poster session of Futures for Food conference in Turku with Beef Finland 2012 project. Few talks in the conference were interesting whilst most of the information was neither with fresh perspective nor new.

One particularly interesting talk I had was with Birgit Busicchia, a PhD candidate at Macquarie University in Sidney researching the dimensions of food security policy in developed economies. Her research was a comparative analysis between Australia, the UK, and France of the dimensions of their respective food systems and policy environments. It was carried out in the tradition of political economy with historical institutionalism as an analytical framework to establish if there is a notion of food policy regime emerging from the research.

Some quotations from her conference abstract:

Is it reasonable to assume that different political economy contexts may have different futures of food? This comparative analysis proposes to explore how political economic variables impact upon and shape current and future food economies of selected developed countries. In view of the interplay between political systems and food systems, it subsequently attempts to imagine their respective futures. Australia, the United Kingdom and France present significant variations as well as similarities to allow for assessing how national political structures, modes of interest mediation and varieties of capitalism construct their respective present and future food economies. Central to this analysis is the question of whether market based instruments and mechanisms, so pivotal to liberal market economies, can be politically enduring as well as being able to deliver adequate social, environmental and economically viable outcomes to the many challenges facing the national food economies. […] This analysis aids our understanding of the situation at present by identifying the principles underpinning the respective national food security discourses and gleans insights into the contested future of food in these wealthy nations.

Institutions can be the cause and remedies to economic, social, and environmental shocks and their associated problems. For instance, the protection of the farmer’s rights have enabled small to medium size farming entities to remain active within the French agricultural sector. In contrast, Britain’s market based mechanisms regulating land ownership have pushed agricultural land prices to unaffordable levels, thus prohibiting entries of new players in the agricultural sector. Today in France, about half of the population live in rural or near rural area working directly and indirectly in agriculture whereas in Australia most of farming is done by the gigantic corporations and only 2% of the population reside in rural area.

You can see Busicchia’s recent writings on The Conversation here.

Today I have been appointed as one of the Demos Helsinki Associates. I will be contributing to internal development of Demos Helsinki with an emphasis on design competence as well as working on research projects with mutual interests in the future.

Demos Helsinki is an independent think tank based out of Helsinki, and its partners – companies, cities, governments and communities – include Aalto University, Biolan, the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, IDEO, Ministry of the Environment, Stanford University, and University of Helsinki, just to mention a few. In the past eight years, Demos Helsinki successfully been leading innovative research and initiatives such as Sustainable Lifestyle 2050 by European Commission and Peloton for low-carbon society.

Read on
Demos Helsinki Global (English)
Demos Helsinki Associates announcement (Finnish)
Demos Helsinki Associates (Finnish)
Partners of Demos Helsinki (Finnish)