Topic
Society
Commentary
The celebration of the 100th anniversary of Finnish independence will start in a matter of weeks. Besides festivities, cocktail parties and memorable speeches, next year will go down in history as the year when challenge prizes came to Finland. Challenge prize competitions, also known as challenge prizes, are open innovation…
Good morning on-demand world! You are better than my dreams, carefully curated into bite-sized chunks. You show me things I never knew I wanted (but still love), because you predict my preferences with the precision of artificial intelligence and with the strength of the swarm. But heck! Whilst progress became…
A woman in her thirties is gazing at a row of computer screens in a dimly-lit room. Each screen is running a video feed from a car driving on the sunny streets of Helsinki. “I must say I’d love to have some life around me”, she sighs, and continues to…
Smart city has become an umbrella concept bringing together strategies for reinventing cities utilizing ICT. Smart city promises drastic leap in energy efficiency, less congestion, more humane conditions, in hot and crowded urban spaces, and overall responsiveness to needs of urban dwellers. Until now, the concept of smart city…
Want to hear and discuss about the future? Do you find both talks and interactive performances as great tools to inspire people to change the future? Then you should attend the next FutureFest, weekend festival organized by Nesta. Here we present some of the notions made at this year’s event….
Publications
Public debate in Finland suggests that care is in crisis, but “crisis” and a fixation on resourcing care services do not capture the full picture of why and how our need for care has changed and how we can meet that need. This publication by Demos Helsinki identifies that the care crisis signals the need for a care transition in which care cannot be confined to industrial frameworks.
How can an organization or a society become wiser? This paper by Demos Helsinki Fellow Geoff Mulgan shares some answers with a framework that cuts across different disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, computer science and organisational design.
We find it easy to imagine apocalypse and disaster; or to imagine new generations of technology. But we find it much harder than in the past to imagine a better society a generation or more into the future. In this paper, Demos Helsinki Fellow Geoff Mulgan sets out thoughts on what, how, and who to address this gap.
Projects
Despite being an established indicator of economic growth, GDP is debated to overlook the true essence of citizens’ quality of life and overall wellbeing. This project aims to improve knowledge on indicators beyond GDP, alternative and more sustainable policy options, and scenarios for a sustainable future.
The social contract encounters mounting challenges in contemporary society, leading to friction and distrust among citizens towards democratic institutions. The CO3 project is dedicated to developing and promoting a democratic, inclusive, and open model of social contracts, embodying political and social resilience amongst significant societal challenges, crises, and anti-democratic tendencies.
How we care for each other is not an issue of healthcare budgets; it is an issue of a long-term, multi-sectoral change. This project seeks to show that there is no amount of money that can revert the current state of affairs. Instead, the care transition requires that we transform, disrupt and renew almost everything that we do.
People
Ella Välimäki
Ella is an Expert at Demos Helsinki, working at the intersection of society, technology, and the wellbeing economy. She focuses on how engagement and interaction can serve as tools for societal transformation. With a background in international relations and EU politics, Ella is driven by a desire to support a…
Anni Saviniemi
Anni is passionate about making sustainability the default in everyday life—an ambition she approaches by focusing on societal and structural changes. She brings expertise in understanding everyday practices, the role of materiality, and how knowledge is produced and shared. Currently, Anni is completing her master’s degree in sociology at University…
Kelly Yen
If you find yourself curious about emerging technologies and their societal impact, Kelly would be a great person to talk to! While engineers accelerate the world into the future with groundbreaking innovations, it’s people like Kelly that’s working on bridging the gap between social sciences and STEM to ensure that…
Lõmaš Kama
Driven by curiosity and care for climate, biodiversity and environmental topics, Lõmaš places his interest in areas spanning across the built environment, governance, futures, social innovation, and public sector innovation. The bridges connecting all these fields for him are collaboration, imagination, and creativity. With a background in strategic design combining…
Lyyli Salovaara
Lyyli is driven by her sociological imagination and believes that today, this imagination must also extend beyond the tangible world. With an interest in digital sociology, she is your go-to person for exploring how technology and digital communities can be harnessed to create more equal, sustainable, responsible and healthy societies. …
Janne Sala
Whether the topic is strengthening democratic participation or finding ways to reorganize food production chains, Janne is a rising expert in the intersection of developing societal change and climate resilience. They combine their academic education in the social sciences with sharp and international political networking to harness a global skillset…
Johannes Jauhiainen
At Demos Helsinki, Johannes Jauhiainen focuses on participation, interaction, impact, and science-society relations within the CoWup and CO3 research projects. He is passionate about public innovation, new forms of decision-making, democratic development, geopolitics, and the role of cities as pioneers of societal transformation. Before joining Demos Helsinki, Johannes worked on…
Katariina Viljamaa
Operating at the intersection of technology and society, Katariina is your go-to person when it comes to communicating projects on the societal impacts of technology and digitalisation. As a freelance marketer and event producer, she can wrap high-level research in neat packages and concepts. With an engineering degree in her…
Anna Björk
Anna is a political scientist whose academic love affairs include research on political concepts, societal impacts of emerging technologies, and temporality. Her current and upcoming research analyses societal transformations from the perspectives of the EU digital policy, contemporary social contracts, and inclusivity. Alongside doing research, Anna is also working closely…
Maria Malho
Maria is a political scientist specialising in foresight, scenarios and futures thinking to create both high-quality research as well as actionable visions and strategies for making desirable futures easier to reach. She has extensive experience in leading and facilitating projects and research processes on a wide array of topics ranging…
Julia Jousilahti
Julia is a social scientist working in Demos Helsinki’s Emancipatory Economy team. As the economy is a man-made system and not a force of nature, Julia is convinced we can build a better economic system – one that admits the fundamental interconnectedness with nature and guarantees the basic assets of…
Johannes Nuutinen
Leading societal transformations is no easy task that we have chosen here at Demos Helsinki. It requires constant strategic planning and new initiatives. Luckily, Johannes brings clarity to all the ambiguity surrounding half-drawn visions of impact. This means finding the relevant concrete steps to implement new forms of collaboration or…
Johannes Mikkonen
Johannes is dedicated to redefining the terms and conditions of our digital futures by exploring the ways to reshape our current sociotechnical systems, advising on policies to remaster technologies and forming visions of emerging alternative futures. At Demos Helsinki, Johannes has worked with various ministries and Prime Minister’s Offices around…
Juha Leppänen
It’s easy to talk the talk, but we take pride in also walking the walk. And ensuring that this happens is our very own Juha. How to build operational hypotheses to truly drive change forward? What is the “form” in “transformation”? How to organize collective action? Juha isn’t afraid to…
Olli Bremer
Olli has worked with us since early 2016, working across all sorts of projects and in a variety of capacities — for example, serving as Managing Director. Thus, he is a go-to person whenever we need to be able to connect different aspects of our work and sew together a…
Themes
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The Next Era: what is the future of the nordic model?
February 10, 2017
How do we guarantee well-being for everyone, if the only thing we know for sure is that everything will change? What is it about? Sitra and Demos Helsinki have launched The Next Era, work to create a vision aimed at a reform of the Nordic model, i.e. the next era…