A shared platform for a sustainable future in the creative industries

The Uusimaa Regional Council is the strategic planner and developer for a region with 1.8 million inhabitants. Its focus is on the region’s internationality, appeal, and the well-being of its residents. As a forward-looking organization, the Council actively tackles current challenges.

One of these challenges is promoting the ecological sustainability transition of the creative industries. Through the Action Programme for the Ecological Sustainability Transition of the Creative Industries (Luoto) project, funded by the European Union’s NextGenerationEU initiative, the Uusimaa Regional Council set out to advance this vital change.

Before the project, information regarding the ecological sustainability of the creative industries—such as research, guides, projects, and calculators – was scattered across the channels of various actors and sectors. This made it difficult to find and utilize the information, thereby slowing down the industry’s collective environmental efforts.

The Luoto project recognized the need for a centralized, user-friendly online service that would accelerate the industry’s sustainability transition and help actors effortlessly find the support and information they needed.

Jaana Eskola, who is responsible for the project, states that sustainability was an important criterion in the partner selection process.

“The supplier’s adherence to sustainable principles was a significant added value for us. We wanted to create something functionally new and be at the forefront of development. We noticed that Hion has a strong sustainability mindset integrated into its own operations, which perfectly aligned with our values.”

Clarity through service design

We began tackling the client’s challenge – a large volume of content, a diverse user base, and limited resources – through a series of workshops. The goal was to create a centralized knowledge hub from which every user could effortlessly find up-to-date information.

“The service design phase included three rewarding live workshops held with Hion’s experts. The workshops were also a great opportunity to get to know each other as a team,” Jaana summarizes.

In the workshops, we delved deeply into the users’ needs:

• We defined and clustered the key user personas and their use cases.
• We designed clear user journeys and, based on them, a logical content hierarchy.
• We specified the necessary content types and processes related to dividing responsibilities.

This strategic groundwork not only created a solid foundation for the technical implementation but also helped our client to structure and understand their own target groups even better.

“After that, the project proceeded in development sprints according to Hion’s operating model. This way of working functioned extremely well: things always progressed as agreed, and results were achieved according to plan,” Jaana recounts.

A smooth process to the finish line

According to Jaana, the final result has met the goals. “We are especially proud of how we managed to distill a vast amount of information into an easy-to-use and intuitive format. Our goal was to create an interesting, clear, and up-to-date online platform that would be simple enough but wouldn’t immediately become obsolete. We feel the site’s structure works excellently and supports this objective.”

The feedback and reception from stakeholders have also been positive.

“It has been a pleasure to note how many have proactively highlighted the platform in their own communications. The platform is a true resource bank whose materials can be revisited repeatedly. The service’s visual appearance, in particular, has been praised with words like inspiring, fresh, and playful.”

And how would Jaana describe the collaboration with us?

“Hion’s clear development model was a huge help for both our team and me personally, especially concerning the work input required from the client. Things were made really easy and clear for us. We didn’t have to spend extra hours trying to familiarize ourselves with things, as they were covered in our weekly meetings, and we always received very fast help via Slack when needed.”