Co-design workshop in Mikkeli

The planning concerned a street located in Mikkeli city centre. It is a connecting street between a historical market square and a beautiful church park.

Our goal was to:

• Make people emotionally engaged to the new street
• Find out why some habitants and entrepreneurs were so worried of this direction of development
• Break misunderstandings
• Understand different stakeholders, their needs and wishes
• Find out weak points and possible solutions 
• Create an outline for the final prototype street plan and design work
• Create a street that encourages social encounters

Two approaches to meet the goals: survey for entrepreneurs in Mikkeli to find out their attitudes towards Maaherrankatu development and about the current stage of it, and  a co-creation workshop for entrepreneurs and habitants. 

For the workshop we created a board game to enable a playful approach supporting the emotional engagement. The game board was the street with its surrounding. The pieces were the different elements you could place to the street. The benefits of this type of approach was that it made it easy for the participants to imagine the possibilities of the street - and to get really excited about it. On the other hand, people could test in a smaller scale in a “kind of scenery” what fits to the street and what doesn’t. This made people really rethink their opinions and ideas on how the street should be and could be.

The final plan for the street prototype was created by reflecting the different design solutions and insights from the workshop, considering the realistic implementation possibilities. The street was prototyped during the months of July and August 2019. This test period will give the direction for the permanent street plan.