Topic

Society

Commentary

Margarine, biohabitat bank, space poop – and few other reasons why you should follow challenge prize competitions in Finland

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…

Future Needs Your Body

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…

Which is better: human or machine? Both, say these Finnish researchers

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…

Which smart city will be the first one loved by its citizens?

  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…

3+1 What we learned at the FutureFest

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….

For genuine integration we need to re-think housing

We seem to believe there is a universal refugee character, someone we can easily recognise in the news. This story of “a common refugee” overwrites individuality and personal experience. The system of integration we now have doesn’t recognise refugees as agents, as if we are printing objectives onto a clean sheet…

Publications

Vision Paper: Care – from crisis to transition

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.

Loops for Wisdom

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.

The Imaginary Crisis (and how we might quicken social and public imagination)

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

MERGE: Building economic policies beyond GDP

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.

CO3: COntinuous COnstruction of resilient social COntracts

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.

A new logic of care

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

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