Sustaining Places: new practices of design and architecture

About the talk:

In this Design Interrupted talk, Anna-Riitta Kujala shares what it means to be responsible for urban vitality, her job since August 2024 in the town of Riihimäki. She will be in conversation with two experienced professionals, Noora Laak from Vantaa’s Urban Planning Department and Ville Pellinen, CEO of Lapinlahden Lähde Oy. They will be discussing why design and architecture keep producing places that do not live up to expectations and describe the practices they have developed to engage with these spaces. Based on valuing what already exists, this principle offers unique ways of leveraging our existing urban fabric. 

About the speaker:

Anna-Riitta Kujala is the Director of Vitality in the City of Riihimäki. Before that, she worked as an urban development expert and manager in the private and public sector. She is an architect by education, with a Master of Arts degree. She is a passionate advocate of sustainable urban development, combining strong vision and strategy with practical implementation. In her work, she wants to enable happy, sustainable and impactful everyday lives for citizens, working with the best experts. In her role as Director of Vitality, she speaks on leadership and sustainable city themes, serves on FiGBC's Sustainability Skills Steering Group and writes the Happy City blog.

About the host:

Eeva Berglund is adjunct professor of environmental policy in the Department of Design, Aalto University. A doctorate in social anthropology and an MSc in urban planning from the UK have helped her explore the relationships between different forms of expertise in the context of environmental politics. More recently she has turned attention to the challenges of sustainability policy in wealthy and comfortable places. She addressed this topic recently in rural Finland as part of a project on nature tourism and economic development, which brought her back to a topic that’s long captivated her, infrastructure.

About our panelists:

Ville Pellinen acts as the CEO of Lapinlahden Lähde, as the Chairperson of the Lapinlahti Community Steering Group and as the Director of ICT, Real Estate, and Business Operations at MIELI Mental Health Finland. Additionally, he holds several board positions in different organizations focusing on healthy urban development. In all his roles, Mr. Pellinen aims to promote societal structures improving humans’ and non-humans’ overall wellbeing; healthy, beautiful and sustainable urban infrastructures; vivid and inclusive arts & culture life; as well as societal entrepreneurship and planetary economies.

Noora Laak is an architect at the City of Vantaa's Urban Planning Department, where she is mainly involved with the new Kivistö district. In addition, she serves as a part-time lecturer at Aalto University’s Department of Architecture. Her work focuses on identifying and applying new, sustainable planning and construction methods to address the challenge of climate change. Societal values and the connection to built heritage play a central role in her approach of shaping the urban environment. Noora is also actively engaged in urban politics in her hometown of Helsinki.

About the talk series:

Design Interrupted Conversations for a 21st Century World

Today, the study and practice of design are in great flux. We are amidst the biggest socio-economic transformation since the 1750s, experiencing the fifth Industrial Revolution. There is a growing pressure to transition economies driven by extractive, wasteful and polluting logics towards systems designed to fit the planetary limits. Such transformation requires the design of new types of products and services, as well as new systems and approaches to large-scale changes.

At the same time, design as a practice area is also changing. It is shifting away from a more rigidly defined practice of professionally trained designers creating graphics, objects and spaces towards a practice that is loosely defined, fuzzy and seemingly omnipresent. Many have been calling for democratizing design and recognizing the efforts of non-professional designers. Design thinking, methods and practices have entered many contexts, including governance, jurisprudence, sciences and activism. The design community has been grappling with the ever-expanding definitions of what design is and who a designer is.

This talk series invites design professionals, students, academics and anyone interested in these challenges to a series of conversations. Each event features a scene-setting lecture by a leading practitioner and thinker followed by open discussion. Three themes give focus to the series: digital, societal and material transformations. What is design’s role in these transformations? How do we generate new know-how to support the needed transitions, and what examples already exist that we can learn from? What stands in the way of progress towards equitable, diverse, and sustainable lives, and what is the role of design in removing such blockages? What are design and designers in this new context?

Department of Design at Aalto University invites you to join our conversations to explore what design is, can and should be in the 21st Century.

The talk series is funded by the Kone Foundation.