���ʵ���

It’s hard to tell a story of something like the , a project that was collaborative, complex, undulating, and something we took quite seriously for five months. We were recognized by the jury as the only Honourable Mention of the year for our storytelling and research, which out of the more than 150 entering teams, was meaningful and encouraging and reflected the challenges and learnings of approaching this topic. Especially given the fluidity of the service design field, I wanted to share a flavour of what service design could be and the messiness and takeaways of a complex real-life project, particularly for those who might be interested in the field. 

The Student Service Design Challenge is an annual international competition held for students, responding to several open-ended briefs hosted by sponsors. For our team, we decided to narrow in on the overlooked topic of supporting single-parents in Helsinki, as part of Philips’ brief on expanding self-care and self-confidence horizons. Our team was Johanna, Sushmita, Ronja, Natthorn, Takashige, and myself, Yuchen, all first years from the Master’s in Collaborative & Industrial Design. We were mentored by our professor Andrea Botero who gave us much needed guidance and a sounding board. We were also warmly supported by the Single Parent Association ()’s project coordinators, who gave us interviews, connected us with participants, and even lent us their office for a workshop.

"How might we support single-parents in Helsinki to thrive?" is a complex and challenging topic. Many factors and challenges are faced by single parents, from structural dynamics of Finnish welfare, daycare system, schools, single parents’ employment, to social-cultural factors of friendships and networks, to personal factors of coping with the not insignificant challenges of solo parenting. Needless to say, the factors that influence the well-being of single parents are numerous, and present equally many angles for a service design intervention. Against this backdrop of an open-ended brief, our added challenges were that only one member of the team was a parent, and all but one were international to the Finnish context.

The phenomenon of single parenting is common in Finland. In 2023, one in four families with children were led by single parents (Statistics Finland, 2023), and nearly all by mothers. Despite Finland’s strong childcare and welfare support system, we saw recurring themes of financial, personal, and social struggle in our literature review. Single parents had approximately 10% higher unemployment rates versus dual parent households (Härkönen et al., 2023), and a third to a quarter were at risk of poverty. Stories of relying on holiday handouts, compromising on food and medicine, solidified for us the severity of the challenges single parents could face (Daily Finland, 2025; Isola et al., 2022; Säilävaara et al., 2024).

Despite our desktop research revealing themes of social, financial, and personal struggles, the issues did remain dizzyingly broad. In our earlier stages, we tried effortfully to understand and frame how we might intervene. We had researched various service provisions, tried to understand welfare payments, and even mapped daycare types to children’s ages. For me personally, a low point came when it seemed the problem wasn’t becoming clearer, especially as some parents fared better than others, which left me questioning the significance of problems or if it was just too variable person to person.

In retrospect, in light of our findings, it emerged more clearly that this is one of the strengths of qualitative research, and by extension design research. While the literature told descriptions and statistics, it did not necessarily tell underlying dynamics and root causes. It did not, for example, tell us where friction arises in the day to day because someone is a single parent, what gaps existed despite the seemingly excellent childcare system, what makes some parents have more challenging situations than others, or what improvisations parents already make.All research methods complement each other, however, the method of research in design helps obtain vivid understandings of people’s lived experiences and reveal granularities - some highly context specific - that more descriptive, causational, statistical research may obscure. 

Overall, our field research involved semi-structured interviews with five single parents, three service professionals, a co-creation workshop with four parents, and a validation interview with several more parents. Several key insights emerged from our interviews and co-creation workshops that informed our final design:

1. Single parents live in a world designed for double parents - Despite Finland’s strong family supports, these have been designed with two parents in mind. Fixed costs such as housing, do not diminish with just one parent. Daycare schedules closely match the working day, leaving little buffer for unplanned work such as overtime.  Evening, weekend and summer daycares are limited, and babysitters can be expensive. The result is single-parents being caught between  work and family, leaving self time neglected.
2. Lack of strong social networks can significantly increase parenting challenges - Single parents don’t experience challenges equally. Proximity to family and friends, reliability of their ex-partners, and accommodating attitudes from their employers all make a difference.
    
3. Parents want freedom, but also want to see their children spend time meaningfully and socially - While additional daycare hours can help, parents don’t want their children merely ‘warehoused’, but to spend their time meaningfully as well. One parent refused gym daycare after her child had already been in daycare all day. Thinking about parental freedom means also thinking about children's wellbeing.
4. Culture of independence in Finland inhibits help from being proactively offered or requested - Finnish culture highly values independence and self-reliance, but this can also inhibit giving and receiving help. Every parent mentioned they wished help was more readily offered, even as neighbours and acquaintances were aware of their situation.
5. Connected to more than just other single-parents, as they themselves are already stretched, however valuable they are for shared understanding and knowledge. Single-parents also wished their children to see different role-models, especially male ones.
6. Localized support and forms of help - Proximity and ease matter. Parents mentioned the ease of access to help with everyday life tasks, such as picking-up children from school or activities, and help with household items.

The picture that emerged was the solo parent who can feel overwhelmed managing all the duties of life with little time to themselves. And although strong supports exist, and single parents may manage most of the time, they lack resilience needed when unplanned events occur and are more sensitive to disruption.

Our insights helped us understand single-parents, but they nevertheless did not point to a clear design direction. A small turning point came, when we repeatedly heard our interviewees wish for having more community - and in light of the fact that advocating for policy or changing current systems was out of our scope - we refined our question to asking how might we curate a community of supports for single parents to better allow them to pursue personal aspirations, self-care, and emotional connections?

Maybe just me, but uncertainty remained. What was the community that was sought? Was it a child-care centered community and hence what was needed was innovation in daycare? Was it personal connections single parents needed with other adults? Or was it just neighbourly helping parents needed in cases of emergencies or simply activities to make everyday life easier?

We narrowed down our final concept to a social connections app called Knitt, symbolizing the weaving together of social fabric. Knitt is a social connections platform for parents to meet other parents and community members in their locality, with shared routines, situations, and goals. Parents can organize playdates, carpools, exchange emotional support, parenting tips and build relations at their own pace.

We saw nearly all parents wish help was more readily offered. We found pockets of relations between parents and community members which had even blossomed into friendships and mutual help such as childcare. We wanted to amplify this phenomenon. We also drew on existing social connection and community helping apps such as Commu (Finland), Nextdoor (US), and Nappi Naapuri (Finland), however, focusing our design more specifically on parents.

Final Reflections

In the end, some issues remained beyond what we could solve in the time we had. Connections building in Knitt remained rather laissez-faire, and is a common struggle of such platforms to build a deep community. Yet deep community is needed to counter the fragility of one-to-one relationships, and for the trust needed for childcaring. And once connections form and people move off-line, how will the platform sustain itself?

We briefly explored schools as neighbourhood nodes, where such platforms may find a footing, where parents share common concerns and can connect to a wider community; we still think this has potential. In retrospect, we could have also researched further existing best practices of single parent integration, and leveraged research methods such as reflective journals alongside interviews and workshops to help parents reflect more deeply on past events and raise richer stories of where community was needed to guide us.

It does somewhat seem the end of the challenge did not end with an equally clear answer. But perhaps this is also a takeaway on the nature of service design in complex situations: to accept progress as in-roads and that there are few fast answers. It’s doubtful whether we would have arrived at where we are, seeing the importance of community to single parents, without the research we did. The current version of Knitt is an iteration and the basis for on-going pivots and adaptations.

Looking back, I’ve no doubt as well we have all been pleasantly surprised at the community we tapped into even in a context foreign to us, the length we came and our endurance, and the formative memories it made in our CoID journey.