What makes one feel like you belong somewhere? This is a question we set out to understand at the start of the Redesign Belonging project (2024-2026). Our objective was to understand the experiences of immigrant women who have settled in Finland. This article explores the co-creative and dialogic workshops organized in collaboration with various immigrant communities in Finland. The workshops we organized h ad a double aim: they aimed at generating understanding about what it means to be an immigrant woman in Finland, but also to support development of possible ideas for the challenge contest.

The purpose of Redesign Belonging (ReBel) project is to co-design solutions that improve belonging in Europe, especially regarding immigrant women. To understand challenges related to belonging, we organized co-design and dialogue workshops for immigrant women living in Finland, engaging women through different kinds of organizations like NGOs. In the workshops, the women discussed the challenges they are facing while making a home in Finland and started to envision the solutions to those challenges. In its next phase, the project dives more deeply into designing the solutions to the identified problems through a challenge contest.

What does belonging mean? Susie Wise (2022) defines it as being accepted and invited to participate, as well as being part of something. It can also refer to being a full member of a community, being able to show up as yourself and being able to have a voice. Othering, by contrast, means the opposite of belonging: that people perceived to be members of a different group to be treated as essentially inferior (Wise 2022).
At the start of a design process, it is common to have a phase in which different research methodologies are used to understand the needs of the people affected by the proposed design. In processes informed by Design Thinking, it is common for the designers to spend time with the users of the proposed design and immerse themselves in their environments. (Design Council 2024.) Within the participatory design paradigm, the role of users in the design process has become more of a co-designer that shapes the outcome of the process alongside professional designers and researchers (Mattelmäki & Sleeswik Visser 2011; Steen 2013).

In Redesign Belonging project, the approach is for designers and immigrant women to co-design solutions through a challenge contest that is open to anyone that who has an idea that will enhance belonging in Europe. The process is illustrated in Figure 1. The first phase of the project was to understand the challenges and opportunities through workshops with immigrant women during the autumn of 2024. Thus, the workshops had a double aim: to gather understanding about the challenges and opportunities for immigrant women but also to initiate designing the solutions. It was our hope that some of our workshop attendees might be interested in participating in the challenge contest later, where they could take an active role in developing their idea further. The challenge contest commenced during spring 2025. After the challenge contest, the best ideas were chosen to be part of Creative Collective that receives support in developing their ideas further. Furthermore, Creative Collective has a chance to gather user insights from various co-creation events in the project countries. Event stakeholders include policymakers, active citizens, immigrants and immigration officials. The Creative Collective phase will go on until October 2025, when the final solutions are showcased and policy recommendations created based on the project results gained.

Journey mapping and dialogue – ReBel workshops

We created two different models for workshops. One model was based on service design tools, and the other on a dialogic approach. The idea behind this was to engage both immigrant women with design experience and immigrant women not yet familiar with design tools.

The workshops aimed to gather understanding about the immigrant women’s experiences and empowering them with a sense of agency to impact societal issues. The two workshop models, a dialogue and a design jam, produced somewhat different outcomes and insights. For dialogue, it is typical to aim at greater understanding, mutual trust, meeting others as equal and respecting different opinions (Holm et al. 2018). The design jam, on the other hand, is a collaborative, playful activity that utilizes design thinking to find solutions to complex and multidisciplinary problems (Tang et al. 2020). It is also worth mentioning that in some workshops we utilized interpretation and plain Finnish language, and some were organized in English. All in all, project partners Laurea and Visio Education Centre organized 17 workshops with total 201 participants during autumn 2025.

In the dialogue workshops, we allowed participants to freely discuss certain topics found in the desk research conducted earlier. The participants were also able to bring forth any themes or issues they found missing from the predetermined topics. First, the women shared their own experiences with a simplified journey map canvas, describing the experience journey the women had when relocating to Finland. Often, journey maps are very detailed and built using data from user research (Stickdorn & Schneider 2011), but in this case the data was provided directly by the people with the experiences. In the mind map, women described the processes as positive, negative or neutral. After that, they engaged in dialogues around predetermined topics from the research. Insights from the dialogues were collected into mind maps. Mind maps are visualizations of insights and ideas that link different topics to a central theme (Interaction Design Foundation 2016).

In the design jam, we utilized design tools in two phases: in the first phase the women mapped the problems and positive experiences they had while moving to Finland, and in the second phase they ideated potential solutions to the problems and solutions that would scale up positive experiences. Unlike common journey maps in service design, the maps we made were simplified and only highlighted the different experiences instead of including different lanes and details. After creating the journey map, the women identified a few experiences they wanted to create a solution for, and ideated solutions by the brainwriting method. It is noteworthy that even if the dialogue workshops did not include methods to create solutions, the dialogues often naturally advanced towards discussing what the solutions could be. As a last stage, the participants chose one idea and developed it further with the help of a Solution Canvas developed by the ReBel project team.

Reflections on the workshop process

Facilitating co-design entails systematically guiding creativity and envisioning, empowering users with tools to contribute to the design process, develop ideas and concepts, and share their experiences (Sanders & Stappers 2008). Co-design facilitator guides participants toward their goals while maintaining neutrality, refraining from suggesting solutions or decisions (Jones 2021; Sipponen-Damonte 2020; Kantojärvi 2012; Bens 2018).

We, as the project design team, had to reflect on what it means to become a co-designer in practice in this project. Power differences and dynamics are always present in a co-design process, both in possible power differences between the participants and in the power that the facilitator has in relation to the participants (Kashtan 2020). We received some criticism from a participant who saw the uncompensated co-designer’s role as unfair. After a discussion with the ReBel project manager, they decided they did not want to participate in the workshop. As a reflection, we could have mentioned in the registration form that no monetary compensation will be given to participants. On the other hand, some other participants expressed gratitude since they were able to share their experiences in immigrating to Finland, and felt they were listened to.

To create less power distance, we stressed in the workshops that participation was voluntary, anonymous, and we required each participant to give their explicit consent to participate. Our workshop registration form included a brief project description mentioning that the workshops aim at both creating understanding about the challenges immigrants experience but also offer a chance to create solutions. The concept of informed consent and voluntary participation was explained to the participants at the start of each workshop.

It was important for us to create a safer space in the workshops. One method to support a safer space we created was called “free speech channel”. It was a QR code operated form to which participants could write any concerns or issues anonymously. For example, if they had an experience that felt was too private to share openly, they could still note it down by using the channel. We also explained how the insights from the workshops would be further utilized in the design process, showing the participants the whole project overview, explaining the activities and how they could participate in the challenge contest with their ideas.

The workshops we organized in ReBel h ad a double aim: they aimed at generating understanding about what it means to be an immigrant woman in Finland, but also to support development of possible ideas for the challenge contest. T his is not unusual for research and development project workshops but in this case, we had to reflect on what it may mean to participants to simultaneously share their very personal life experiences and try to innovate solutions based on them. Regarding generating possible solutions and motivating participants to enter the challenge contest, many good quality submissions came from Finland, even if the topic of immigrating to Finland is not an easy one.

The workshop participants reflected that when discussing all the issues, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by all the challenges, which may not be the most conducive to innovating solutions. Still, in the design jam workshops, participants produced interesting and impactful solutions for the challenges of belonging. As reflection, it may have been better to separate the research workshops from innovation workshops and therefore have a clearer aim at each event.

At this stage of the project, it can be concluded that the workshops produced varied and dense qualitative data, with varied groups of research participants, and important themes and experiences emerged regarding the participating women’s experiences of settling in Finland. The data provided an extremely thorough base onto which the innovation challenge can be built on, providing information about the needs, obstacles and opportunities of immigrant women. After the workshops, participants experienced gratitude for having a space to share these experiences and having an experience of being heard. The workshops offered a platform for women to find commonalities and new connections.

References

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