0 \ Welcome to discuss city design

In this episode, our hosts Päivi Vartiainen and Saara-Sisko Jäämies lead our listeners to the city design podcast and briefly tell what to expect from the first season.

Saara-Sisko Jäämies works at Digitalist as Senior Service Designer. She has previously worked in a city organisation and with public sector services for over 15 years. Saara is a passionate professional in service design, co-development and facilitation. Her special interest is the development of services for people's everyday life and the citisen experience. As a service designer, nurturing the social nature of change is particularly important to her. Saara believes that effective and meaningful experiences are created by listening to people and their needs and co-developing, therefore the most important task of design thinking and creative co-development methods is to stimulate discussion and dialogue.

Päivi Vartiainen works at Digitalist as a Lead Insight Specialist. For Päivi, it is especially important to bring out the voice of the users in design projects. She has had a long career as a user researcher and usability expert, first in industry, and for the last 7 years as a consultant in many different projects of the public sector and the City of Helsinki. Päivi has developed a special interest in the more comprehensive and systematic development of cities through the means of design. Päivi especially gets fired up in discussions about increasing empathy and also utilising data, so that existing information can be utilised as efficiently as possible.