Designing for wellbeing

In Rethinking Villa Breda, the first formulation of the design brief took
place when negotiating the project contract between Aalto University
and representatives of Kauniainen, including the director of culture and
leisure, director of social and health services, and chief of senior services.
This took place approximately six months before the project started. The
brief was further elaborated in several meetings. Additionally, to create
shared expectations and objectives, a half-day workshop focusing on framing
the design problem and the design brief to be given for students was
organised a few weeks before the students started. More than ten people
participated in the workshop organised by the project coordinators: the
professors responsible for the three student courses and the core representatives
from Kauniainen. It was decided that the design brief should
be left purposefully open, so that each student team would need to frame
their own approach based on their learning during the course. This enabled
meaningful foci for the students and made it possible for them to suggest
diverse perspectives for public senior services.
The overall topic was to develop ideas for senior services to be provided
by the Villa Breda service centre in Kauniainen. Instead of just focusing on
physical healthcare, the students were encouraged to look at, for example,
the meaning of cultural services in seniors’ wellbeing. Accordingly, the
services did not need to be limited to the ones provided for the permanent
service centre residents or even the elderly in general, but could cater for
a wide range of customers and people living in Kauniainen.
A general structure for the three courses was created including a) a
kick-off event at Kauniainen at the very beginning of every course, b) one
co-design workshop to verify and co-design ideas together with people
living in Kauniainen and with invited experts, and c) final presentations
in Kauniainen for anyone interested in learning about the project. In
between these events, the students conducted their own studies on the
topic, the city of Kauniainen and its inhabitants. As many students were
not Finnish, they didn’t know the area beforehand.
59 · Co-design with the public sector