I am empathic

Empathy to me is a cornerstone of good design processes. It means being good at listening and engaging with users, clients or coworkers. In my career empathy has meant giving a speech to graduating students of Aalto ARTS during the pandemic, working with disabled users and rebriefing design research around marginalized and criminalized people. It is important not to just hand over products or services, but capabilities to change.

 
 

I am a leader

Leading, managing and planning design processes are my core competences. Being very organized and structured shows in everything I do and I often take lead in a team if it is necessary or possible. I have also studied management and leadership. As a leader it is my responsibility to ask why, and question whether the solutions we create have the right kind of impact.

 
 

I am creative

My creative capabilities are broad and deep. They range from ideating service concepts, to producing aesthetic visuals like layouts, prototypes and photography all the way to understanding creative processes and being able to facilitate the creativity of others. I use creativity in framing issues: understanding that what is asked of me(brief) is always not the best solution and being able to vocalize that (rebrief). Being creative makes me able to tolerate ambiguity in exploratory inquiry in design processes, but I am still able to synthesize data and crystallize insights and focus points from a large pool of data.

 

I am systemic

I have a systemic and strategic approach to my work. This means understanding people and communities as behavioral and socio-technical systems, and finding ways to leverage or nudge people into making better decisions or changes. I also prefer to interpret designing services in the systemic context of the legislation governing them. My systemic approach also includes understanding us humans as an embedded system inside the Earth’s natural systems, which we depend upon.

 

I am reflective

To me, reflection is crucial for learning and development. I look at the past to interpret today and decide about the future. I reflect on my values and accomplishments but also my failures, which do range from realizing that a solution I’ve used in a project might not have a solid scientific background or questioning the way we produce products. My reflections tell me I want to continue to pursue designing for services and sustainability. To really reflect and dig deeper into my working practices, I made a feedback survey of how it is to work with me.