Episode highlights
- 00:02:30 – Mariana’s move to Finland
- 00:05:11 – Using participatory design in Helsinki’s urban development
- 00:10:45 – Designers’ role in shaping public policies
- 00:20:28 – Participatory design in public services
About our guest
“Mariana Salgado is a senior designer and researcher specializing in service and interaction design with a focus on participatory methods. She produces and hosts Diseño y Diáspora, a podcast on design for social change in Spanish, Portuguese, and English, with 570 episodes and 6,000 monthly listeners, making it the most popular design podcast in Latin America. Currently, Mariana works as a service designer at ICOS ERIC, contributing to the EU project IRISCC.
Her career includes leading Inland Design, a Finnish innovation lab for immigration services, and collaborating on cultural heritage, global health, and participatory projects with diverse communities. Mariana has also worked as a researcher, lecturer, and co-founder of a design studio.”
We bring methods, expand collaborations, and focus on inclusivity by asking who should be involved. Are we leaving anyone out? Are we listening to those directly affected rather than only their representatives?
Podcast transcript
[00:00:00] Tina Ličková:
Welcome to UX Research Geeks, where we geek out with researchers from all around the world on topics they are passionate about. I’m your host Tina Ličková, a researcher and a strategist, and this podcast is brought to you by UXtweak, an all-in-one UX research tool.
This is episode number 50 of UXR Geeks. And I find it a great coincidence that it’s exactly Mariana who became our guest for this episode as she is being a podcaster herself. Before I explain what this recording is about, I allow myself to give a big shout out to my wonderful team from UXtweak who are creating the podcast with me.
Thank you, Barbara, for starting the journey with me. Thank you, Janka, my current producer, for all your patience, for the willingness to learn, as well the support you are giving me right now when life is a little bit too rocky. Thank you, Daria, Teresa, Patrick, and Mel for all your work in the past or now.
And thank you Lubo and Edo, the founders of UXtweak for giving us the space. Last but not least, thank you, Tadeáš. Big thanks to you as you see the importance of the project, I appreciate and hope for your continuous support.
And now back to our guest. Mariana, who is an Argentinian designer living in Finland, and we discussed together mostly her experience and contribution in the field of immigration. Mariana emphasized the importance of participatory design and is a strong advocate for designers’ role in the public or governmental project.
If you’re curious on how she was researching and designing for the relationship, for example, of citizens to the forests. Also, don’t forget to, especially when understanding or speaking Spanish, to tune in to a very successful podcast, Diseño y Diaspora, where you also can find some English episodes. Tune in.
Great to have you on the podcast, Mariana.
[00:02:24] Mariana Salgado: Thank you for inviting me. Nice to be here talking with you, Tina.
[00:02:30] Tina Ličková: Thank you. I do have the classical question who you are, but I would like to also ask you about your.. I wouldn’t say a naughty immigration story, but a moving story because you are an Argentinian living in Finland.
I’m amazed by this move because, yeah, it’s, I love Finland, but it’s a cold country.
[00:02:52] Mariana Salgado: Yeah, but I think that when I decided to come here, I didn’t know how cold. So it, and I am a very brave person in general. So one of the things I can tell you about me is that I go every day in the morning to the Baltic water and I swim.
It lasts less than a minute. And, you know, in Finland, we are very. proud because we think that by swimming in the cold waters, we get better blood circulation and immune system also. I, every day, my day starts with swimming in the cold waters of the Baltic. So I came here 24, Years ago, and I am a mom of two young that I love to have them at home sometimes.
And I came here to do a master in design in a strategic product design. And then I study a lot. So I have done a PhD here also on design in the media. the media laboratory in Aalto University. I have been researching on how museums could be more democratic. So it was in between interaction design and museology, my research.
That was many years ago. And then I have been working on issues on
[00:04:13] Tina Ličková: Before we deep dive into immigration, I am wondering, do you also take sauna after the cold bath or you leave it like that?
[00:04:21] Mariana Salgado: No, no. You leave it like that. The whole idea is that then, because your skin gets completely red and you feel like after running a marathon, you feel really energetic after that.
No, because I don’t have the time in the morning to go to sauna. If I do the whole thing, the swimming and the sauna, then I will be two hours. True.
[00:04:45] Tina Ličková: But you made me miss the cold water. And you were mentioning this part of your life or where you started to design and research on immigration. And this is super interesting in that way because immigration could be many things and it’s a very abstract term in the design kind of meaning.
Tell me everything how it started and what are you doing with it now or what you did.
[00:05:11] Mariana Salgado: It started with a small project in the East Helsinki, where the city of Helsinki wanted to build some buildings because there is a lot of people coming from outside Helsinki to that, so they, for doing that, they wanted to destroy part of the green land of that area, and we had a certain money for a project project that was part of the World Design Capital in 2012.
Helsinki was the World Design Capital and we did a very participatory project with the immigrants in that area trying to understand how do they use the forest, how and with all the neighborhood there and all the neighbors. So not only the immigrants but trying to build dialogues within the The immigrants, the public authorities, the Finns that were living in that area.
And we did a proposal for the city of Helsinki, and that was evaluated together with the proposal of the architects of the city. So that was my third. project in relation to immigration. And then many years after, there was this opening of an innovation and design laboratory as part of the Finnish Immigration Service in Finland.
That was in 2017. Then I was hired to be Part of this pioneering laboratory, and we have done a lot of different services and a lot of different improvements of the already existing services for that organization. For example, if you want a concrete example, so it’s easier when I entered into the organization, we only could answer 24 percent of the incoming calls.
So people were asking, Hey, do I get my residence going to get it? Or they were asking a lot of different things that immigrants want to know about their permission to come to the country or their status. And we couldn’t answer because the organization didn’t have enough resources and there was a lot of calls.
So we have created a chatbot that answered part of these questions. calls. When I left the organization in 2019, at the end, we were already answering like 74 percent of the incoming calls. Of course, there was other improvements in parallel to the chatbot, but the chatbot answered the most simple questions.
And that means that for the complex one, when you really need an expert to answer, then the telephone Has more, people have more resources to answer these complex things, like when a whole family have different type of residence permits, for example, and they have to evaluate each of them and tell them about it, how each of these things are going.
And then in 2020, I started to work for the Ministry of the Interior here in Finland and the work was completely different because it was not anymore in the implementation of public policies because the chatbot chatbot. you are implementing a public policy, which is to serve citizens in their search for information about the service.
So it was a service, a digital service, and we were working in that moment as part of the digital service unit in the Finnish immigration. But then when we went to the ministry, I went to to the Department of Immigration, and there is where we do, there is about the creation of public policy. So these are like the new laws or the new strategies, the new papers, plans.
There is different type of policies. public policies, that they have different scopes. Sometimes it’s a strategy for four years, sometimes it’s a decision making paper for 10 years. So there’s different types of these, of these documents. So we were working in the implementation of this. immigration policies.
And what is a designer doing there, right? There’s a lot of things to do because when you are creating a new public policy, you are always consulting different persons. So the main task was designing participation. So who do you listen in which moment of this process? And this is something that designers, we do all the time, right?
You don’t just start designing, but you start by listening, can understanding what’s the context, what is what the people that the service that you are creating or the experience that you are cared in, what is what they want? How do they need it? So we do the same to design participation, including. The private sectors, the universities, the NGOs, the private sector.
So different immigrants that could also be consulted. So depending on what was the document we were doing. I would
[00:10:20] Tina Ličková: like to go back to all the projects, but I started with the one that you were mentioning as last. What is the acceptance of the policymakers towards you as designers? Interfering what in their business field and telling or designing with them the laws and the policies because I’m just thinking out loud now, but imagining it, it might be that they feel exploited
[00:10:45] Mariana Salgado: or no, they, some of them, they feel that there is nothing that you can’t ask because they know already what needs to be written.
in that document, right? So there is some of them that are very, it depends on the attitude. So I had some colleagues that were super open minded and they were really like, yes, let’s do a workshop and consult all of them together on the key questions, because then you can discuss these key questions together.
And it’s not like you go to one organization and they tell you we have to do green, and the second organization said you have to do. blue and the third says you have to do red. If you discuss all together on certain topics and you know how to facilitate these situations with these negotiations happen, you really can understand better what to do.
because you, you can understand the consequence if you do red, green, or blue and why the other organizations are against or in favor, right? A lot of my work was to design and facilitate these situations. And also, of course, to provide visual source for understanding. What we got from these different consultations and these visual thoughts, it could be, I was working there, for example, on times of pandemia.
So we had a lot of online workshops in which we were using tools such as Miro or Mural, these type of boards. And in the context of ministry, the This is completely new, right? Because normally you have meetings, and in the meetings there is someone notes, and this someone taking notes is the one that decides what goes in the notes and what doesn’t go in the notes, or how do I write what you have said, and it’s very different If we are all writing together what we want and in the, in the same moment, and how we believe it has to be written, right?
All these tools, they are also tools that allowed for less hierarchicals. ways of working. And it’s not only these type of tools for doing online workshops, but also now the many of these visual tools that allowed for many persons to be writing at this, writing or doing and drawing at the same time. This is part of what we bring, no?
We bring methods. We also expand collaborations because we are always, as designers, very committed to the question of who do we invite to design with. So are we invited all the ones that need to be invited? Are we forgetting someone? Because sometimes, for example, we might consult the NGOs that represent the immigrants, but we are not consulting the immigrants themselves, and they might have something to say there.
So we, we are, as designers, we are always very committed to be inclusive to who are we invited to the table to give us advices or to give us ideas of how this works. next policy has to be written. So we expand these collaborations and we also propose these policies for doing brainstorming, for having creative moments, no?
When we don’t know exactly what to write, We also say, hey, why don’t we try to think together and be imaginative on how we can solve, no, they are very complex issues and it’s not white and black and we really need to motivate public imagination. So it’s, it’s, we are always proposing this moment to pause and Brainstorming and pause and think about something.
And this is also healthy in environment where they are not, this type of practices are not the common ones.
[00:14:57] Tina Ličková: You were also designing a project which totally got my attention, which is called immigration dialogues. And I find it interesting because you were mentioning the facilitation. I also find it interesting because of the political energy that comes out of it.
It’s one of the most spoken topics in the public for the last, I would say five, six years, or even for earlier. So how did you come. to the idea of organizing immigration dialogues and how do you facilitate such dialogues?
[00:15:30] Mariana Salgado: The immigration dialogues were the, a pilot for the national dialogues in Finland.
So the idea was that to do these dialogues in order to document the experience and then at the moment, for example, we have a group of different organizations from the private and public sector that get together and say, okay, the national dialogues this year are going to be on this. topic. And then whoever that wants to organize these dialogues, they do it.
But the newness was that it was the initiative of a ministry to launch one of these dialogues. And so, and what does it mean? It meant that whoever could organize their dialogue. So Universities, you yourself in your own living room, the public sector companies could organize a dialogue on immigration. So we provide the material.
We have also provided training. So if people wanted to organize the dialogue, they knew how to facilitate that. So we did not Facilitate all the dialogues. There were 62 dialogues in the whole Finland and around 600 persons participated. And these for Finland scaled, we are 5 million people. This is a lot.
And also the, the dialogues were organized all around Finland, not only in Helsinki. And we used a method called time out. And there is a lot of people in Finland trained to. facilitate dialogues using this method. For example, people in libraries, in museums. So because they know how to do it, then it’s easier that they could say, okay, I catch this idea of the immigration dialogue and I organize my own dialogue.
But Why this has been successful, it was because the 83 percent of the persons that participated in these dialogues, they have never ever before have participated in something like that. They have never been part of influencing a public policy. And this is extremely important. And also because there was like, of course you could, there were certain dialogues where you have people that have never really.
be talking two hours with an immigrant. They were sitting there facing each other. Now, sometimes persons that have participated said that their only contact with an immigrant, it was with the person bringing the, delivering the food. So the possibility to sit two hours and to talk about a topic in relation to immigration was very new for some of the participants and And some others have decided to organize a dialogue on within immigrants, or it could be like the composition of who participate in this dialogue could be any.
And another thing why this has been very interesting is because normally, When we consult people, taking in consideration one thing we want to change in a law or in a strategy or in a plan, and it’s very specific. So what do you think about this search and client? In the case of the dialogues. It was, it was a whole open agenda.
So whoever that organized the dialogue could decide what is what they wanted to talk about. I want to talk about raising kids in Finland. I want to talk about unemployment for immigrants. And the other was talking about daily life in Finland or identity of immigrants, whatever. So what’s the difference is that.
As we have such a broad question in migration dialogues, then it’s easier for us to rethink the whole policy, to rethink the whole, to rethink, to think starting from their own agenda. So starting from the things that they propose to have a dialogue on. So it’s not that we are consulting on something very specific, but they are telling us what are they worried about in relation to immigration, and then we can see how our policies.
served to that end of what are the things that can be done in relation to what they are worried about. That was the philosophy behind that. And this, we have done it with Anna Rungel. That was, she was my colleague in the ministry when we were doing that year in 2000.
[00:20:06] Tina Ličková: So people were bringing their own perspectives, even when it comes to the topics.
And you were already mentioning it a little bit in this topic. I imagine diversity and inclusion is just the part of the DNA of the project. So how did you actually invite to participate and allow for exchange of the citizen with the project?
[00:20:28] Mariana Salgado: We did not organize ourselves all the dialogues. Of course, we have been facilitating dialogues within our organizations and within the Finnish Immigration Service, but people themselves.
So it was the representing immigrants that they have organized dialogues. So the whole idea is that these, whoever could organize dialogues. So we were sending letters. emails and doing a lot of publicity. So a lot of people having different interests and different political views on immigration could be organizing this dialogue.
We have sent, for example, to all the political parties, to all the different gyms or the different clubs for sports or the different, because we really wanted to have a very broad view of immigration. on immigration. Not only a group. So we did not decide who organized the dialogue. And then we have hired two researchers that compile all notes that came to after this dialogue.
So there was this 62 dialogues and we have instructions on how to take notes on that because we wanted to. To have a lot of this qualitative data. So the real saying of the people. So this as a report, it’s a very different one as the ones that we normally do because you can really feel and hear the immigrants saying, and the people that have participated in this dialogue.
You can really. Here, how they have said, like, to the letter, right? We had these notes of these 62 dialogues and then the two researchers compile it and make it into one report.
[00:22:18] Tina Ličková: This is what I would like to emphasize because I love that you started it. In the sense of diversity and inclusion principles, you were mentioning clubs, gyms, and all the political parties in the spectrum.
It starts with a recruitment with the having a broad audience or target group to research or do things with. And I got stuck when we started to talk about on the project that you were mentioning as first, where you were designing the houses for and giving a report to the architects in Helsinki, because you were mentioning that you were asking people, the neighborhood and the immigrants, how they are using the forest.
Can you tell me more about this? I just can’t get over it.
[00:23:06] Mariana Salgado: Yes, we have done a series of workshops, that was 2012, and we have done a series of participatory workshops, having wooden pieces and Lego pieces and a map of the area and asking the neighbors, okay, we know we have to build in this, in this area.
So where do you want to place these new buildings? And what it was interested is that most of them, including the immigrants, none of them wanted to destroy part of the Greenland. So the forest, They all wanted to protect the forest and that was the outcome. So we, what they proposed was in building, which means like building within these small little spaces that are within the buildings and not really go into the forest.
That was the proposal. of the architects of the city. They wanted to destroy part of the forest in that area. So, we first did these workshops, then we create a new master plan for with these groups of architects that we had, and we gave that master plan to the city. to Helsinki city so they could decide if they wanted to have a proposal that was like backup by the neighbors in which they don’t destroy the forest or if they wanted to have other type of proposals with other criteria.
But we did our participatory workshops in order to allow them to have their saying into that very important part. So this is why we were asking them how do they. Use the forest and because we wanted part of the agenda was that we wanted to understand how important was for people in the area, the forest and where could it be possible to build, not the city of Helsinki needs to build a lot because they, there is a need to build at that moment, it was two buildings for 2000 inhabitants in that area.
[00:25:16] Tina Ličková: When you would, I have to sound right, I think it’s visible, but having a designer on such projects as immigration or topics, what would you say is the value of having designer and user researchers? in these topics?
[00:25:35] Mariana Salgado: The value is that you could do solutions and designs and proposals that aligned with the deeds and the context better, right?
So it’s easier afterwards that people will be happy approving that because they were a part of the participatory process of building these proposals.
[00:26:01] Tina Ličková: What I love also is the fact that we’re, everybody who is in design or loves design is looking into the Scandinavian countries because those are the best one.
You mentioned Lego, that is Denmark, Sweden with Ikea, although everybody is guilty of buying something there. Finland, it’s also great in any kind of design. I feel the real magic is in. openness of this country’s to do work in a participatory way to invite people. And I’m wondering your personal kind of perspective on it.
[00:26:41] Mariana Salgado: If you have a designer in the team, then the participatory process is coherent and consistent. And it’s not only something that you just click on and check. Let’s do a participatory thing with the neighbors, but you also bring these to the final decision making because we are also analyzing, visualizing and providing tools so they can be actionable, right?
That all this data is not only collected, but it’s also used for the next step. step for making that public policy or for making that master plan or for making whatever you want to make, right? So this, a designer there makes the data actionable for the next step. You were mentioning Kea and Lego. In Denmark and something I wanted to tell you is that in Finland we have a network of designers working for the public sector and this network has 500 designers and we call it friends of design because some of them they are people that they don’t they might not have as a job description the designed work so they are not designers but still they are interested and implementing design.
[00:28:04] Tina Ličková: This participatory and this making it coherent and making it really of use in the final decision can be super, super exhausting. Immigration isn’t exactly the easiest topic and I am wondering how you deal with such Complex processes as a person.
[00:28:27] Mariana Salgado: I learned a lot over the years now. And I think we are better designers when we know about the subject matter.
So the fact that I have been working on the same topic during more than 10 years makes me a little bit of a better designer in that field, because I know who could. be the state for, for the stakeholders to invite because I understand the whole ecology, know who are the ones that need to be of a certain question.
So I, I, I really loved to be in that position in which we know about the subject matter, but of course they’re experts in immigration and I could never be like them because you have someone that has been reaching the same law of immigration during the last 20 years. So of course, They have much more experience on the subject matter.
And I’d really love to work with these experts. So when I had that opportunity, it was, it’s very enjoyable. This combination, when we are bringing new methods and new ways of doing things, and they have the expertise on the subject. And you mentioned that could be very exhausting. In my opinion, it’s also very inspiring to talk with people and to work with them because in many cases we don’t have a solution.
It’s not that because we are the public sector, we have all the possible solutions to these very complex problems. Problems. So they have also told us, Hey, look into this and this could be a very good option. And then we start to research that. And it’s very important to have all these dialogues in which we learn from the experts in NGOs or in other public in organizations that are also working with the same topic.
[00:30:17] Tina Ličková: Mm-hmm . Yeah. My last four. Is that we hear a lot of designers on the conference and startup world, how they are going to change the world, but it’s usually the wealthy people problems. But I feel like if designers, and especially after talking to you would give more time to the public services and also the countries were enabling it.
That it would be much of a use. Is there anything like that. You wanted to tell me and I somehow didn’t give you a chance that you’d need to share with us.
[00:30:51] Mariana Salgado: If you are in a public organization and you want to know about the value of a designer, I could tell you that we designers make participation more coherent and integrated to the project.
We motivate civil servants to also do research instead of always outsourcing that. And these change attitudes, these change the way of perceiving a certain complex problem. We bring new working practices that are less hierarchical, and we bring more qualitative research methods to decision making. And. I think it’s really worth it to try out and to give more space to designers.
Where can people follow you? Where can people follow all your activities in EX or Twitter? Mariana Salgado Dine, uh, on Instagram, I also host a podcast. We haven’t been talking about that. I host the most recent podcast in the Spanish speaking region, and this is about social design and it’s 6,000 listeners a month.
But most of the content is in Spanish. I have some episodes in English, 10 of them, something like that, but I plan to do more. So you can also follow me on Instagram and on Twitter.
[00:32:12] Tina Ličková: Great. And all the people out there who speak Spanish, please listen to the podcast because it’s definitely worth it. And those of you who want to listen to the English episode, search for them.
Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.
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