In December 2023, Neighbourhood mothers were invited to collaborate with the Trust-M research project, on the basis of their decade of building trust within local communities, organising inclusive and accessible events.Trust-M is a partnership between Aalto University, University of Helsinki, Tampere University, University of Vaasa and City of Espoo. The project aims to create trustworthy digital public services for improved integration and inclusion of migrants in Finland. Neighbourhood mothers, both managers and volunteers, participated in various activities to support this research. The collaboration aimed to be mutually beneficial, with researchers hosting workshops and activities, providing insight and connecting the organisation with the City of Espoo, and Neighbourhood mothers facilitating the participation of their community.
Expert Workshops with Espoo Managers and Other NGOs
In the spring of 2024, Anni Susineva and Analyn Wagas-Hyvönen attended Trust-M workshops with people from the City and NGOs that support resident participation. The aim was to identify what’s preventing Espoo residents, especially those with a migrant background, from participating in various activities organised by the city. These participatory activities ranged from low-threshold events to voting. After initial findings were analysed by the researchers, Anni Susineva and Debjani Chauduri attended a follow-up workshop, where they had an opportunity to challenge the insights and come up with more concrete ideas for participation.
Design Training for Women – Welcome to Espoo Postcard
In May 2025, some Neighborhood mother volunteers joined a design training with an aim of redesigning one of Espoo’s communication channels to be more welcoming; the “Welcome to Espoo” postcard. The training was organised as a series of workshops, facilitated by Trust-M researchers, with the support from Debjani Chauduri, who was Neighbourhood mothers Espoo branch manager at the time. Espoo city representatives joined the workshops as the aim was to create two-way interaction: residents could have a say in the city’s communications while learning about service and visual design. The redesigned postcard was sent to new residents of Espoo in Autumn 2025, reaching over 7 000 addresses. The course participants later attended a Trust-M event with Espoo employees, where they had a chance to talk about their designs and experience of the training.
Publications
This summer of 2026, three articles were published based on these activities. All publications are free and open-access, and can be found in the full references below.
1) Frictions and constraints of institutioning: Facilitating equitable participatory design with migrants in municipalities
Based on the expert workshops, a paper was presented at a design research conference (DRS2026, Edinburgh). The study focussed on how to make participation a more sustained practice in the city, and what’s preventing that. The main findings are analysed through different levels. For example, on a societal level, discrimination and racism can prevent people from participating, no matter how well-organised the events can be. On a strategy level, it can be difficult to sustain participation because of the short term nature of funding, which creates some sort of “project graveyard” when excellent initiatives are discontinued. On a practice level, a lack of follow-ups after a workshop can be a factor that discourages people from participating. Also, when different organisations are working towards similar goals, it can create overlaps or gaps for migrant residents, when they are confused about which service to use. The paper suggests that strengthening grassroots work is the key to sustaining resident participation on an institutional level. NGOs can serve as less-formal spaces that connect people and institutions and where vulnerable people can feel empowered.
2) Scaling Care-fully: Uncovering Labours of Care When Scaling Participatory Design in the Public Sector
Another paper was presented at a Human-Computer Interaction conference (CHI’26, Barcelona), based on different research activities, as well as in-between meetings and long-term collaboration. Here we articulate the different forms of invisible work done by NGOs, the City, and researchers alike in creating inclusive and caring spaces. For example, there are certain introspective or emotional efforts such as recognising how your own identity influences what you care for, or managing emotions of workshop participants when discussing difficult topics such as migration. At the same time, there are more practical, but still not visible tasks, such as ordering coffee and celebratory cake, writing well-structured emails for participants, arriving early to prepare the space, making sure that there are extra laptops available if needed, deciding which space to book so it would be easy to reach and so on. These efforts are all extremely important for people to feel cared for, and yet not always easy when working with constrained budgets. The paper concludes that when scaling participatory activities, these caring practices need to take the center stage instead of happening on the sidelines.
3) Equitable and Inclusive PD for Public Services: Using Shared Reflexivity to Unpack Enablers and Limitations
One more paper based on different research activities was presented at a Participatory Design conference (PDC’26, Milan). A more critical and reflective piece, the paper breaks down different participatory activities that took place during the Trust-M project, looking into whether well-intentioned actions were actually inclusive or equitable. The paper discusses, for example, how the expert workshops were not supporting equity since the migrant residents themselves were not there, but explains that the reason for it is prioritising their safety. As the meetings included managers from the City of Espoo, the assumption was that migrant residents or NGO volunteers would not be able to express themselves freely in such a setting, so the NGO managers were advocating for them. However, the design training involved a group of women who could interact with Espoo employees directly, as discussions were around a specific design object-postcard.
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There is at least one more publication still in the making, based on the design training. The findings show that such initiatives as design training can lead to higher levels of service literacy, meaning that the residents understand better how public services are organised and know where to seek help. At the same time, Neighbourhood mothers and Trust-M researchers are continuing this partnership and discussing new ideas for meaningful collaboration.
Trust-M is part of the SHIELD program funded by Strategic Research Council (SRC) running between 2022-2028.
Writer: Rūta Šerpytytė, ruta.serpytyte(a)tuni.fi
Articles:
- Uttishta Varanasi, Rūta Šerpytytė, and Thomas Olsson. 2026. Frictions and constraints of institutioning: Facilitating equitable participatory design with migrants in municipalities. In Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh , 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.566 (Visit an external site. The link opens in a new tab.)
- Rūta Šerpytytė, Uttishta Sreerama Varanasi, and Thomas Olsson. 2026. Scaling Care-fully: Uncovering Labours of Care When Scaling Participatory Design in the Public Sector. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 262, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791207 (Visit an external site. The link opens in a new tab.)
- Uttishta Sreerama Varanasi, Rūta Šerpytytė, and Joanna Saad-Sulonen. 2026. Equitable and Inclusive PD for Public Services: Using Shared Reflexivity to Unpack Enablers and Limitations. In Proceedings of the 19th Participatory Design Conference 2026, Vol. 1: Full Papers (PDC ’26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 303–314. https://doi.org/10.1145/3796624.3796650 (Visit an external site. The link opens in a new tab.)
More about the postcard on Espoo’s website: https://www.espoo.fi/en/news/2025/11/we-welcome-new-residents-city-postcard (Visit an external site. The link opens in a new tab.)