By Rūta Šerpytytė – Design Researcher at Trust-M
After 365 days of the grayest winter ever, it feels as if our DVV workshops in autumn were ages ago. Back then we still had some bright hours in the day, in fact, I think it was quite warm and sunny!
After several email exchanges, a couple of online meetings, and some planning sessions on our end, on the 16th of September 2024, I was rushing to meet Viivi at the DVV door. She messaged me that, apparently, we need a code to get in and that our DVV colleagues are nowhere to be found. Turns out, we were waiting at the wrong door – the door where people were queuing to get into the International House Helsinki, where I myself queued more than four years ago. Our DVV colleagues finally replied to our desperate emails, that we should enter through another, queue-less door. This felt almost ironic, thinking how at Trust-M we are all about helping migrants to find the right door (service) to improve their integration process.
Why DVV?
After clipping on our “guest” badges and grabbing a coffee, we arrived at the room where Viivi and I would soon start our workshop on national identities and Finnishness. Two weeks later, I would come back for another workshop on participatory infrastructures alongside my other colleague Uttishta. More specifically, the workshops explored:
- National identity is both a personal feeling and a product designed by the state through different means, including public policies and services. In times of Finland’s diversifying population, we need to reflect on the concept of Finnishness. For example, how could it be more inclusive towards ethnic/language minorities and improve migrant integration and belongingness?
- As the population is diversifying, we should ensure that everyone has equitable opportunities to participate in our society. There is a need to examine existing structures for participation of residents, with a special focus on migrants and think of new/better infrastructures where participation is inclusive.
Both these topics have to do with DVV’s foresight “Digihumaus” report which highlights “ageing and increasingly diverse Finland“. I asked our collaborators at DVV, how does our work on migrant integration relate to their services, besides being in the same building as International House Helsinki.
In their words:
- ”DVV’s background as a fusion of the former Population Register Center and State Register Offices means a long experience with immigrants and their official affairs.
- DVV‘s quick and even innovative reaction to the influx of Ukrainian refugees (using AI translations to offer Suomi.fi content to the refugees) showed the agency’s capacity to adapt to unforeseen situations with immigrants.
- DVV specialists deal with different immigrant communities and different cultures on an almost daily basis when registering newcomers, and the practices abroad can vary a lot from our register-based practices.
- It’s related to our aims towards more smoothly functioning cross-boundary services among the Nordics and Baltics.
- The laws and statutes say what DVV must do, can do and can’t do; this makes our operations predictable and stable, also for the immigrants.
However,
- We are very much bound by the same legislation that facilitates our operations. If we wanted to get creative on how to serve migrant communities, we would probably not be able to do that – unless some idea gets accepted by the Ministry of Finance, and even then it might take years. “The public sector ship turns very slowly”, as the saying goes.
- Municipalities have their own immigrant services and their services and ours are not always working seamlessly together. So, if Trust-M comes up with a brilliant new process in Espoo, that does not necessarily reflect on us.”
Methods to think about our futures
So far, our research in Trust-M has been mainly ethnographic, carefully examining the current situation on migrant integration, perhaps exploring some opportunities for change, but not thinking too far-ahead in the future. As we were collaborating with foresight specialists here, we took this opportunity to be more speculative.
In the “identity” workshop, we asked: What if we were to collect ethnicity data in our data registry? What good and bad consequences would this have? What if we were to collect data that’s more fuzzy, like open questions and opinions from residents? We mapped ideas around these questions on a “Futures wheel”, added potential consequences, then further consequences of these consequences, and so on.
”If I remember correctly, our initial thoughts after the “Futures wheel” was that maybe we should have focused on some concrete DVV matters, even though the method itself was very fruitful.”
In the second, “migrant participation” workshop, we brought cards to play with. On one side of the card, we outlined main challenges that hinder migrant participation that we identified in our research. On the flip side, we turned these challenges into principles for building future infrastructures for participation. We asked people at the workshop to choose only one card as the key principle for a future “Department of Belonging”. Then, the participants had to create a floor plan for such a department, carefully thinking how the layout and objects in the plan represented the chosen values. For example, would an open plan layout translate to a willingness to host different communities? Or would a choice of onsite data centres be a metaphor for a commitment to data privacy?
”Personally, I was very excited about the department of belonging work and I can’t wait to read your article on that! It would be a great tool and framework for understanding the values (or doing the valorization) in different projects/topics/organisations.”
I was curious, how did our collaborators perceive such methods:
”Speculative and exploratory methods are necessary to a) keep us civil servants awake and aware, and b) maintain a level of preparedness in this world of rapid, sometimes unexpected and unwanted disruptions. However, there’s always a risk of doing a number of great workshops where fresh ideas and perspectives are discovered, but will they lead to anything real?”
Reflections on finnishness and belonging
So, the methods had their pros and cons, but what did we actually learn in these workshops? As the goal of these interactions was to provoke new thinking and plant the seeds for the future impact, immediate results are perhaps not apparent. Fortunately, months have passed, so we could ask our partners what thoughts stayed with them.
How do you see the concept of Finnishness changing in the future?
”Finnishness has always been dynamic and changing. It is important to understand the history behind the formation of current nationstates and perhaps we should be more precise and subtle when we define or discuss what is worth preserving and what is open to change in society, culturally and historically.”
”For example, when we think about Finns and Finnishness, are we thinking of sullen, reserved people who work hard, eat meat, spend a few euros on lotto each week, go to sauna religiously, drink too much, spend summers in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, divide work into men‘s and women‘s jobs and are suspicious of foreigners? Yes and no. Some of those stereotypes are close to reality, others not. No one Finn embodies the mythical Finnishness anyway.”
What about the Department of Belonging, can it become reality?
”I really appreciated you deconstructing and presenting the pitfalls and breakages in immigrant participation in public sector projects. That helped us immediately, as we were working on a participation project at the time. The Department of Belonging as a concept is inspiring but I guess it would have to wait for better times, both economically and politically.”
Personally, my “aha moment” at the Department of Belonging workshop was that most of the elements for it to exist are already there, either in the shape of new (trustworthy) AI models, certain institutions or individuals. However, the connections are still missing – the infrastructure is what we need to work toward (but this deserves a separate blog post).
Why collaborate?
Finally, I feel like it’s good to reflect on the value of research and public sector collaboration. Trust-M is an impact-driven project and we appreciate every chance of sharing our findings with people and being invited to institutions that shape our society. Of course, we have also collected data from the workshops – and that might have more selfish results in the shape of academic articles, as we continue studying these two topics.
”I think it was great that our collaboration wasn’t just one point here or there, rather we managed to do something together for at least a little bit longer period.”
Workshops organized by: Rūta Šerpytytė, Viivi Eskelinen, Uttishta Varanasi.
Big thanks to our DVV collaborators, who decided to stay anonymous here.