Turku Design Studio

Turku Design Studio (TDS) would serve as a home for design education and research activities of Turku. Particularly the Digital Design track of the Mechanical Engineering program of the University of Turku, directed by Professor Yong Se Kim, is actively leading design education and research in Service Design, Customer Experience Design, and Product-Service Systems Design centered around TDS.

TDS has currently two design studio spaces: one at Koneteknologiakeskus (KTK) and another at ICT-City. TDS-KTK offers design education and workshop facilities to serve creative design teams of 6 to 8 teams of 3-4 members per team with design thinking tables and boards. A separate meeting room for quiet online design collaboration and meeting can hold upto 6 design team members. The digital design space is equipped with high performance design workstations. Rest and break activities are to be supported by the cafe space with a full-scale kitchen facility. TDS-ICT City is located on the 5th floor (B part) of ICT-City. TDS-UTU can support design thinking education and workshop for upto 5 teams.

Current design research and education projects at TDS include:

SEDE-FAN (Finland-Asia Network for Sustainable Experience Design Education): an EDUCase Project to build the network of higher education institutes in Finland and in various countries in Asia so that successful efforts in Sustainable Experience Design education can be shared.

SEUS (Smart European Shipbuilding): the SEUS project, an EU Horizon project,creates a Smart Shipbuilding Framework for European shipyards, which will support to develop novel practices for human-centric shipbuilding activity mapping and knowledge management with AI supported document intelligence. The University of Turku and CADMATIC form the central research team with several other European academic and industry research partners.

Dining Flow (Smart Service Systems for Self-Service Restaurants): The objective of the Dining Flow project is to enhance experiences of diners and service providers and to reduce food waste in Self Service Restaurants (SSR) by offering smart service systems to support decision making activities of SSR stakeholders based on structured representations of activities and experiences of diners and service providers in conjunction with data obtained from SSR stakeholders and various SSR artifacts including SSR environment structures. The Dining Flow project is a Business Finland Veturi project with multiple work packages. TDS leads two work packages, WP5: Design and Development of a Smart Service System for SSR and WP3: Kitchen Area Process and Experiences, and collaborate in other work packages, including WP2: Dining Area Process and Experiences.