Espoon kaupunki

Europe’s most sustainable city relies on the LINK people

Starting point: focusing on a shared vision

LINK is a framework agreement partner in service design for the City of Espoo and is involved extensively in the development of municipal operations and services. Espoo, which has already been chosen as Europe’s most sustainable city for the second time, is a constantly evolving international innovation centre that aims for an increasingly functional future with the support of LINK’s user-driven service design team.

Kuntakanvas tool: more efficient and inclusive development

To support the design work, LINK developed the Kuntakanvas tool together with the city’s internal stakeholders. It not only involves and structures the design work, but also gives some colour to the leadership work tinted with legal and process diagrams.

What is it about Kuntakanvas is a strategic tool for planning, developing and managing operations. Kuntakanvas encourages cooperation and makes it easy to structure complex entities and any changes in them in visual form.

Above all, Kuntakanvas takes the development of projects towards genuine cooperation. Often, your organisation has a variety of files and varying work models. The tool makes the overall picture and goal state easier to understand, and the design supports the city’s strategy better.

English as a service language takes us towards a more international Espoo

Espoo has the second largest foreign-language population in Finland. It is estimated that by 2030, one in four Espoo residents is expected to have a mother tongue other than Finnish, Swedish or Sámi.

LINK is involved in the English as a service language reform, which improves the accessibility of the city’s English-language services and strengthens the involvement of English-speaking people in joint decision-making.

One of the objectives of Espoo’s city strategy is to add English as the city’s service language. As a result, Espoo would become the first city in Finland to operate in three service languages. The aim is also to attract more international expertise and to involve the current residents who handle their affairs in English more strongly into development work. How about that!

Espoo Link Design

Espoo health and social services website: ensuring a more functional everyday life

Municipal services are of no use unless local residents find or have access to them. An example of facilitating the services of local residents is a project focused on improving the customer experience of the City of Espoo’s social and health services website. LINK laid the foundation for the development of the site toward a more user-friendly direction by including both staff representatives and end customers in the work. An expert assessment was also carried out on the current web pages: the usability of the pages was assessed in light of the general usability principles and by mirroring with the most typical use cases of customer personalities based on research work.

The groundwork provides specifications for further improving the usability of the site so that, regardless of the user, you can make a dentist’s appointment online without frustration, and you can find the necessary phone numbers and offices without an engineering degree. We will continue to work tirelessly to improve the accessibility and usability of municipal services!

Espoo Innovation Garden – explore the world's smartest community for visitors

Espoo Innovation Garden is the largest innovation hub in the Nordic countries, built around the Keilaniemi, Otaniemi and Tapiola areas. The vortex of the hub has also aided the emergence of companies such as Supercell and Rovio, which have gained worldwide fame. Recently, the Innovation Garden made Espoo and the whole of Finland proud by winning the Intelligent Community Awards 2018 competition organised by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF). Espoo was the only European city to make it to the top seven finalists in a competition whose topical theme was the use of data in people-centred service design.

As a design agency, LINK is a natural part of the innovation garden that combines research, development, education and business activities, but also develops its visibility and accessibility for outsiders. One of the contact points in the introduction of the Innovation Garden hub is the Tripsteri mobile app, which functions as a digital tour guide for those interested in the innovation village. Together with the customer and representatives of different stakeholders, LINK created innovation-oriented content, visit themes and paths in the application to the delight of key visitor types. Thanks to our groundwork, the application is able to lead the many kinds of innovation tourists, messengers and independent travellers to the deepest hole in Finland as well as to the Startup Sauna facility.

What we did

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