Department of Design

Design Culture People

Design Culture brings together academics in the Department of Design who explore the significance of design in contemporary society.

Guy Julier, kuva: Sanna Lehto — Guy Julier

Guy Julier
Professor - Co-leader

Guy’s research explores the economic and sociological dimensions of design in contemporary society, with a particular view to neoliberalism, its variants and its alternatives. Building on this, he is also interested in the intersections between Design Culture Studies as a form of enquiry into contexts and as a creative practice that impacts in them. He is a researcher on the Research Council of Finland funded Nokia Design Archive project.

He holds a PhD (2001) from Leeds Metropolitan University on ‘Design and Transition in Spain and Hungary’ and an Honorary Doctorate from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest ‘In recognition of his international representation of the science of Design Culture’. His books include The Culture of Design (2014) and Economies of Design (2017).

Annamari Vänskä Docent, Adjunct Professor, at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture. — Annamari Vänskä

Annamari Vänskä
Senior University Lecturer - Co-Leader

Annamari, PhD, is a researcher of visual culture, fashion, art, and design. Her research focuses on fashion as a cultural and embodied phenomenon, fashion curating and the effects of digitalization and datafication to culture and design. She holds two Titles of Docent at the Universities of Helsinki and Turku. Her work develops and explores qualitative and experimental methods of research and analysis. Annamari is currently the Deputy Leader of the research consortium Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (IDA), and the Leader of the research project Intimacy, work and design (Strategic Research Council at the Research Council of Finland, 2019–2025).

Annamari has been awarded e.g., with “Docent of the Year” title for research, teaching, and societal impact (2013) and “Scientific Book of the Year Honorary Mention” (2013) for her monograph on children in fashion advertising, Muodikas lapsuus (2012). Part of Annamari’s academic work is curating exhibitions, and she has curated 23 exhibitions in art and fashion in 2003–2023 nationally and internationally.

Explore the IDA project at www.dataintimacy.fi/en

Eeva Berglund
Adjunct Professor

Eeva teaches part-time in the multidisciplinary Creative Sustainability programme at Aalto University. Academically supported by a doctorate in social anthropology and an MSc in urban planning, both from the UK, she has long explored issues around environmental politics and transformations in notions of knowledge and expertise.
Her interest in the histories and cultures of design has grown out of her work on environmentalism, which began with ethnographic research in Germany in the 1990s, and continued with engagements with urban activism in London and Helsinki. Currently she is working through data from the ERA-Net funded CONTOURS project, which allowed her to do new fieldwork in Kainuu.

Anna_Valtonen_Aalto_University_photo_Mikko_Raskinen 400px — Anna Valtonen

Anna Valtonen
Professor

Heidi Paavilainen
Senior University Lecturer

Heidi has a master’s degree in textile design and a doctoral degree in industrial design. She’s interested in how (designed) ideas and objects are adopted, domesticated, and become parts of the unnoticed, taken-for-granted everydayness. This interest is reflected in her teaching: History of Innovations and Design, Design-Driven Foresight and Design & Media Cultures all deal with design’s impact on culture and how the design profession has evolved as the surrounding culture has changed. Currently, she focuses on developing foresight education for AaltoEE and tries to find time to write about design pedagogy. Heidi is the director of the BA Programme in Design and Fashion and the head of the BA Major in Design.

Namkyu Chun
University Lecturer in Design Communication

DA Namkyu Chun has been interested in critically engaging with discourses on design practices while questioning the social role of the (fashion) design profession. This interest emerged from his cross-disciplinary experiences, including fashion design/merchandising, journalism, non-profit fundraising and design consulting, in multicultural contexts from East Asia to North/South Americas and Nordic Europe.

Namkyu’s relationship with the Aalto community began in 2014 as a doctoral candidate. Since the completion of his doctoral studies in 2018, he has gotten more involved in teaching and educational development activities (e.g. MA Thesis Journey) and research projects (e.g. Creative Practices for Transformational Futures).

Currently, Namkyu is working as a university lecturer in design communication mainly responsible for Bachelor’s Programme in Design, which is situated in the Department of Design, and Department of Art and Media.

Design historian Kaisu Savola, photo by Sanna Lehto — Kaisu Savola

Kaisu Savola
Post-Doctoral Researcher

DA Kaisu Savola is a design historian and curator who is interested in exploring the values, worldviews and ideologies behind the work of designers, both historically and in the contemporary moment. Kaisu currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Nokia Design Archive research project at the Department of Design.

Kaisu's doctoral dissertation, 'Disrespectful thoughts about design': Social, political and environmental values in Finnish design, 1960-1980' was published in 2023. She has curated 'Everyday Experiments', the Finnish pavilion at the XXII Triennale di Milano in 2019 and, most recently, 'Kaiken kansan muotoilua' the spring 2022 headline exhibition at the Design Museum in Helsinki.

Natalia Sämäkari
Post-Doctoral Researcher

DA Natalia Särmäkari is a fashion and design researcher who focuses on socio-technical contexts shaping the fashion design culture. Her doctoral thesis “From a Tool to a Culture - Authorship and Professionalism of Fashion 4.0 Designers in Contemporary Digital Environments” (2022) investigated designership within the emerging phenomenon of digital fashion.
Natalia works in the consortium Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (IDA), project Intimacy, Work and Design (2019–2025), and as an independently funded postdoctoral researcher at Aalto ARTS, Department of Design. She explores how the fashion design field is increasingly interlinked with gaming, computer science, AI and datafication. She is also interested in the implications of digitalization on fashion education, virtual embodiment, curation and preserving fashion as a cultural heritage. Initially trained as a fashion designer, Natalia has a diverse pre-academia work experience in the fashion industry and beyond.

Alla Eizenberg
Doctoral Researcher

MA Alla Eizenberg is a researcher of fashion, her work investigates high-end fashion commodities, in which dirt is referenced as a design element. Alla’s study aims to unpack fashion’s fascination with one of the most sordid and debased elements of everyday life, and to investigate how and why fashion references and interprets dirt. It also considers whether the meaning of dirt changes in light of its adoption into the fashion discourse.

Starting her career as a fashion designer, Eizenberg has worked for and collaborated with fashion companies and institutions in Belgium, Italy, and France (Maison de la Création, 2011). She started her own up-scale menswear line Maison Rouge Homme in 2005, during which time she also worked with renowned choreographer Ohad Naharin and Bat Sheva Dance Company, and started teaching fashion design. Since 2010, Alla has been living in NYC, where she is a Part-Time Assistant Professor in Parsons School of Design, as she continues working on her PhD in Fashion Studies in Aalto, Finland.

Ida-Sofia Tuomisto
Doctoral Researcher

MA Ida-Sofia Tuomisto is a researcher-designer with a keen interest in exploring the creative practices of fashion as meaning-making processes and aesthetic engagements. They investigate how thinking through – and with – clothes and materials can open approaches to unravel unquestioned assumptions and values inherent in the current fashion field. Their research understands fashion as practices connected to our everyday lives as habitual and persistent methods with the potential to unravel and challenge the commercial ideology connected to the fashion system. Their research is focused on investigating the role of the DEIB framework in fashion culture to develop more open and inclusive methods in fashion design and its education.

Ida-Sofia holds an MA in fashion design from Aalto University and their thesis “Being natural is simply a pose” – a critical intervention into conventionality of clothes through the process of experimental fashion design (2019) explored the role of clothing in shaping sociocultural dynamics and constructing identities such as gender.

Ushnah Amjad
Doctoral Researcher

Ushnah Amjad (MA) is a fashion researcher-designer. She is interested in studying
transitions in the fashion system against technological advancements and their impacts on fashion design, production, dissemination, consumption, engagement and education. Her
discourse is driven by questions of inclusion, diversity, and demarginalizing in the current
Western fashion landscape.

Her research focus is digital-only fashion— fashion designed in and for digital
environments and adopts a practice-led approach. In her doctoral work, she is
investigating the disruption of conventional fashion by digital fashion designers from a
social and cultural sustainability lens. She is probing digital fashion design tools and
practice to assess their effectiveness in upholding plurality and inclusivity in designing
metahumans, aka fashion avatar.

Ushnah is a research member in the consortium Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture (IDA) and
affiliated with the network of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Research at Aalto. Her
MA thesis collection ‘Shoes That Do Not Exist: A digital-only footwear collection inspired by everyday footwear fashion in Helsinki’ was the first all-digital collection in the Fashion,
Clothing and Textile Design programme at Aalto University. The collection was showcased
in The Wardrobe of The Future exhibition as part of Helsinki Design Week 2022 and at the
European Parliament in Brussels, 2022.

Elise Simonsson
Doctoral Researcher

MA Elise Simonsson has worked with both corporate and non-profit organisations within the fields of art, design and ceramics for the past twenty years. She is experienced in PR & communications, brand development, project coordination, exhibition production, content creation and sponsorship.

In her research she approaches the creative practice of the Arabia Art Department Society from an auto-ethnographic perspective. Her latest writings include “The Fin(n)ish[ed] Ceramics Industry” in AfterGlow, New Nordic Porcelain (2022), presenting the industrial history of ceramic production in the Nordic regions and “Arabia Art Department Society 20 Years” (2023).

Currently, Elise lives in Fiskars Village where she is finalising her doctoral studies for the Aalto University, Department of Design.

Nastasia Fomina
Doctoral Researcher

Nastasia Fomina is a design researcher with a background in product, industrial, and spatial design. She holds a Master’s degree in Art and Design and has been deeply immersed in craft practices, intertwining her design work with the stories and meanings embedded within objects. In her second Master’s thesis, Storytelling by Design, completed at the Bauhaus Dessau, she shifted her focus from creating objects to exploring processes and narratives. This work challenged traditional storytelling methodologies, employing a "not only but also" framework to push the boundaries of narrative exploration.

Throughout her career, she has led multicultural and interdisciplinary design research projects, collaborated with businesses, institutions, and design agencies, gained experience in global production, and successfully launched and managed design brands and studios.

Since 2022, her research has focused on Ukrainian forced mass migration, particularly how evolving identities and notions of belonging are shaped at the intersection of art, design, sociology, and anthropology. During this period, she has gathered over 50 stories from displaced Ukrainians, documenting their experiences of arriving in and integrating into new environments with the support of the IWM Institute in Vienna. Her passion lies in delving into Cultures, hiStories, Objects, and Making practices, driven by a profound interest in understanding how these elements influence and reflect the human experience.

Michel Nader Sayun
Project Designer

MA Michel Nader Sayún’s interest lies in the social dimensions of design, organisational change and the societal impact of design practices. He currently serves as a designer and researcher within the Nokia Design Archive research project at the Department of Design in Aalto University. In September 2024, Michel will begin his doctoral studies, in the School of Business.

His master's thesis, titled 'Decoding Smart Kalasatama,' was published in 2020. This thesis critically evaluates the social impact of technological solutions aimed at enhancing citizen well-being in Helsinki. Continuing his exploration into the social impact of design projects, Michel has contributed to various publications. Notably, he co-authored "Evaluating Social Impact of Smart City Technologies and Services: Methods, Challenges, Future Directions" in 2023. Furthermore, Michel coordinated the research on career paths of design researchers for the 'DocS4Design' network. This effort culminated in the publication of "Faint Traces of Social Impact in Design Ph.D." in 2023.

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Former members of the Design Culture research group

Pauli Pakarinen
Postdoctoral researcher

PhD Pauli Pakarinen is an organizational scholar examining the intersection of work, technology, expertise in occupational and organizational settings. Pauli uses ethnographic observation, archival work, and interviews to develop new understandings on how expertise and technology are mobilized by groups of experts and professions to produce effects and interventions: solutions, advice, foresight, and technological and economic futures. He is currently working around the themes of design work, occupation, and expertise in technology development in Nokia Design Archive project.

Pauli holds a Ph.D. in Organization and Management from Aalto University, Finland. Before joining Aalto University again, Pauli worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Emlyon Business School, France, and at Stanford University, USA. Learn more at paulipakarinen.com.