Trust-M newsletter No. 3

“Design is the act of seeing something that we want to be better, and then the activity of making it better.” -Paul Pangaro

For many people, design is a familiar term in contexts such as furniture, clothing, or architecture. Recently, the design of digital services has become an increasingly important form of design work. Service design helps ensure, among other things, that online services and mobile applications are easy to use and fit for purpose, but it is also important to consider customer service encounters and processes through the means of design.

All design work is characterised by a focus on solutions and an orientation towards the future. Design is always cultural, normative, and political: the designer defines practices and conditions that affect the everyday lives, perceptions, and possibilities of thousands, even millions, of people. These characteristics of design are especially pronounced in the context of migration and integration work, as those who have recently moved to a new country may be in a vulnerable position, and their cultural background has a significant impact on how they should be encountered.

This is also where a central dilemma of service design lies: complex socio-cultural issues cannot be addressed with one-size-fits-all solutions because of human diversity, yet at the same time it is impossible for a service provider to offer everyone personally tailored service. Consider, for example, the different personal stories behind migration, fundamental differences between languages and cultures, or different ways of understanding basic concepts such as “home,” “family,” or “home country”, not to mention more theoretical concepts such as integration, participation, or trust.

The Trust-M project approaches the challenges of cultural integration also through service design. Our researchers, who represent different traditions of design, have explored, among other things, how to communicate the existence of services targeted at migrants to their intended audiences in a way that makes the service offering understandable and appealing. Together with the City of Espoo, we have developed solutions for how a new municipal resident can be welcomed by those who have previously migrated to the country. We have also developed methods for inviting and engaging residents from different cultures in various development activities. All of this has been carried out in careful dialogue with the City of Espoo and several organisations, including Neighbourhood Mothers (operating under NiceHearts ry) activities and Espoon Monikulttuuriset Lapset ja Nuoret ry. Above all, as service designers, our aim has been to identify and acknowledge the power that design work brings, and especially the responsibility that comes with it: “With great power there must also come great responsibility.” Our key approaches have included participatory design, traditions of care ethics, and methods that sensitise researchers to build understanding and empathy towards the groups and individuals who are the subjects of services.

In answer to the question posed in the title, yes, integration can be designed. However, this requires particular care, sensitivity, and continuous calibration of the designer’s moral compass.

Since the previous newsletter, the following publications have been added to our website:

The article Equitable and Inclusive PD for Public Services: Using Shared Reflexivity to Unpack Enablers and Limitations offers a practical and honest perspective on what it takes to make participatory design genuinely more inclusive and equitable when working with underserved migrant communities.

The article Agency, Autonomy, and Relationality in Public Services: Tales of Migrant Mothers in Finland offers a fresh perspective on how better public services should be designed by considering not only the individual, but also the broader relational context, including the often invisible support networks behind the scenes. The article challenges us to examine service development not only from the perspective of efficiency and digitalisation, but also through people’s real-life situations and the ways they seek help.

In the blog section of our website, you can also find:

In AI Is Becoming More Confident, Silas Rech discusses the changes in the way AI communicates and what broader impacts these changes may have on society.

Toolkit for Trust-M Speculative Video Workshop Based on our research, we have produced three short videos and built a toolkit around them. Its aim is to help shift the focus of discussion from technical solutions towards practices based on relationships and care. You can watch the videos yourself and reflect on what kinds of thoughts they evoke.

Most interesting podcasts:

Onko tekoäly taikasauva, joka tekee julkisista palveluista vähemmän byrokraattisia? | Tiedeykkönen | Yle Areena (only in Finnish) This podcast explores whether AI can truly make public services smoother and less bureaucratic, or whether expectations around it are too high. In the episode, Aaro Tupasela discusses the Aurora AI project and the ethical questions it raised, such as whether public-sector AI can guide citizens towards a “good life.”

Designing Inclusive and Equitable Public Services Through Participation (Finland). A talk with Annukka Svanda In this podcast, doctoral researcher Annukka Svanda discusses inclusive public service design

Websites worth exploring:

FAKTA-lähde kokoaa suomalaista informaatioympäristöä käsittelevän tutkitun tiedon yhteen paikkaan – Faktabaari The publishing of FactBar Faktalähde project is approaching. If you have not yet heard what it is about, it is worth taking a look here.

Lakitutka.fi The University of Turku maintains a useful service whose goal is to increase interest in the mechanisms through which laws are created and make information related to lawmaking available to more people. The aim is to promote the transparency of legislation, highlight influencing related to legislative processes, support an active civil society, improve everyone’s opportunities for participation, and facilitate research related to legislation.

Blog posts:

Neighbourhood mothers supporting research – recent publications – Neighbourhood mothers Take a look at the blog post published by Neighbourhood Mothers, in which our researcher Rūta Šerpytytė discusses our collaboration with them.

Espoon tekoälykäännöskokeilu päättyi | Espoon kaupunki One of the aims of the Trust-M project was to pilot public digital services. We had the opportunity to concretely support the implementation of the City of Espoo’s AI translation experiment, which used machine translation technology to translate the HelloEspoo.fi website, aimed at newcomers in the early stages of integration, into 10 languages. The experiment has now ended, and you can read more about it here.

At the Integration 2026 event, Irena Bakic and Zahra Hosseini will give a presentation as part of the programme “Tekoäly ja digitaalisuus kotoutumisen edistämisessä” ( AI and Digitalization in Supporting Integration)  on Wednesday, 28 October 2026, from 13:15 to 15:30. Zahra and Irena examine experiments conducted by the City of Espoo and the Trust-M project through a trust framework. The framework was developed by bringing together perspectives from the social sciences and human-computer interaction (HCI) to provide a more holistic understanding of trust in public services, particularly digital services.

At the Kuntaliitto Digital Morning Coffee virtual event, professor Tom Bäckström and researcher Silas Rech will give a presentation for municipal-sector employees titled “Tutkimuksesta käytäntöön: ihmislähtöinen tekoäly kunnissa – osallistava palvelusuunnittelu ja kielimallien vertailu” on Thursday, 12 November 2026.