Design with Folk — Co-creating community and communication

Client: Matit ja Maijat, Finnish folk dance club
Role: Service Designer (MA thesis project)
Focus: Service Design / Co-creation / Community Engagement / Communication / Facilitation

Spring 2020

Overview

Design with Folk was a service design project conducted in collaboration with Matit ja Maijat, a Finnish folk dance club. The club brings together dancers, teachers, and volunteers around a shared passion for folk dance and community.

The project addressed questions around communication, transparency, and shared ownership as the club continued to grow and evolve. Some board members were overloaded, and several everyday processes lacked clarity and consistency. Through service design and co-creation, the project aimed to support the club in clarifying structures, strengthening collaboration, and building a shared foundation for future development.

My role

I led the project end-to-end: framing the challenge, engaging stakeholders, planning and facilitating research and co-design activities, synthesising insights, and developing design outcomes. The work was carried out in close collaboration with the club’s board, dance teachers and members.

Process & approach

I began by building an understanding of the club’s ecosystem and internal dynamics. This included meetings with the board and semi-structured interviews with dance teachers to surface pain points, workload distribution issues, and opportunities to improve how activities and information were organised.

Based on these insights, I planned and facilitated a co-creation workshop that brought board members, teachers, and dancers into the same space. Creating a shared forum was a deliberate choice: many of the club’s challenges were not just structural, but relational. The workshop enabled participants to map experiences, visualise the club’s activities, and jointly imagine how the community could function in the future.

The qualitative material from interviews, discussions, and the workshop was analysed and synthesised into themes that guided the design work.

Designing the conditions for collaboration

The design outcomes focused on three interconnected areas:

• Shared understanding and vision
  A vision poster and a set of visualisations that made the club’s structure, roles, and relationships visible and easier to understand.

• Communication and activity management
  A website redesign concept to support clearer, more transparent information sharing and to consolidate key processes such as joining dance groups.
  In addition, I proposed tools and practices to support the board in coordinating activities and resources more sustainably.

• Community engagement and ownership
  Clarification of roles and responsibilities. Recommendations for communication structures that support participation, continuity and shared ownership.

Outcome & impact

The project helped the club form a shared vision and make everyday work more visible and manageable. Responsibilities that had previously been unclear or unevenly distributed were discussed openly and clarified, and key processes such as communication and activity coordination gained a clearer structure.

Equally importantly, the co-creation process strengthened dialogue between the board, teachers, and dancers. Bringing everyone to the same table created trust, surfaced perspectives that had not been heard before, and supported a more open and collaborative way of working.

The club was very pleased with the work and outcomes. The project demonstrated how human-centred and participatory design can support grassroots organisations in addressing operational challenges while strengthening community cohesion.