Projects

INCLE.AYY

"INCLE.AYY" is a two-way communication stream that empowers inclusive decision making and bridges the communication gap between the student body and the Aalto Community with the goal to establish a student community that is well integrated and supported culturally

Inclusive

STUDENTS INVOLVED

Isabelle Horlings

Xinyue Ruan

Lea Roca Roldos

ABOUT

Aalto University

City as a Service

In the forthcoming years, Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland will transform their conceptual vision of ‘School as Product’ into a ‘School as Service’ that utilizes the surrounding resources to organize the education of the future. This project aims to rethink, add new functions, and develop end-to-end strategies from a protected, monumental heritage into an open innovation hub through the collaboration with our Service Design department. Ultimately, to serve the greater goal as a platform for co-creating value with partners of the university, opening up the campus for the city and transforming ‘the Otaniemi Road’ into a lively (street) community.

Student Empowerment

Aalto University’s future mission is shaped to open up the conversation on equality and inclusion while improving procedures, policies and support services within. Taking part in the ongoing debate on these topics, as part of our qualitative data analysis, we identified that the lack of international languages usage has been a repetitive topic of discussion. Even though Aalto University is on the internationalisation path, traditional Finnish law prevents international integration from being established. Challenges such as ‘segregation’ between students are being identified due to the university’s insufficient peer support. As they don’t have access to an ‘official platform’ that utilises the student body's voices to make equal and inclusive decisions on their education. To empower those student voices, we worked closely with the University Student Union to bridge the communication gap and produce inclusive student cultures.

Co-creation

Within the current situation, Aalto University is receiving many insights to various problems that the Student Union representatives (AYY) would like to solve. Unfortunately, through the use of third party resources, where they extract information from, produces an extensive amount of data, in which quality data gets lost. Our team contributes to the strengthening of support services within Aalto University by providing an online communication tool. Instead of letting quality data get lost, we conducted a series of mini co-creation workshops to better understand their choice to take ownership of their learning development. We’ve gained valuable insights into what ‘our future users’ define as reliable data feasible to implement with our service. At the same time, we challenged ourselves to transform into a transparent platform that focuses on user-balancing acts of anonymity and accountability.

Communication of our service: the Web Responsive App

To present our service to the client, we captured ‘smart’ solutions to increase student engagement, participation and co-decision making by visualising multiple touchpoints. Our front user can access the INCLE.AYY (Web Responsive App) via their associated University account. While logged in, they can freely choose to post entries (anonymous or signed), which are concerns, complaints, initiatives etc. When entries are taken into account, an appointed member of the representative student council will advocate the student body’s best interest during decision-making processes. While utilising this ‘institutional user’ to dignify and make student union policy transparent for our followers. In return, our service has an open floor for discussion to establish a cooperative agreement and visibility for students that feel underrepresented in a bureaucratic system.

What makes our service unique?

INCLE.AYY believes that through inclusive user-centred design, we can build a safe environment for students to voice their opinions while building a reliable platform. We encourage discussion, peer to peer collaboration and SU engagement to create unity within the Aalto University’s student culture. By building partnerships with external developers, being able to selectively and exchange quality data, we can centralize user transparency which is a valuable key component of our design outcome(s). In the form of a C2C communication tool, our service participates in strengthening the support services needed for Aalto University.

Value-based ecosystem

In INCLE.AYY ecosystem, we communicate our service position and the change of value amongst the main stakeholders. While we propose that the service be developed, externally, by third parties in which we identified two potential developers. In means of budget, through extensive interviewing, we understood that our service needs to seek funding through the internal budget of Aalto University. As our stakeholders, the Student Union, IT and management would not own enough human resources and budget to develop our digital touchpoints. Besides, our service provides quality data, co-creation, and increasing student participation to guilds, associations and consequently, the representative council. Our team also aimed to map out our next steps of development, the physical touchpoint, in the form of a future student centre. Ultimately, throughout the entirety of our service development, we will heighten the feasibility of our ecosystem.

Projects

INCLE.AYY

Co-creation

Communication of our service: the Web Responsive App

students involved on the project