Industry Project 2024/2025: City of Porvoo

idbm00
Jun 10
3 min read

The IDBM Industry Project Course is a seven-month journey of collaboration, exploration, and innovation, where students addressing real-world challenges in collaboration with industry partners. This year, we’re inviting you to follow 10 different stories as our teams move through different stages of their project journeys.

Hobbies are more than just pastimes for young people. They play a key role in shaping identity, building confidence, and fostering meaningful friendships. They’re also essential for supporting mental and physical well-being. Yet in Porvoo, a concerning trend has emerged: around the age of 15, many teens stop participating in hobbies.

Why does this happen? For some, traditional organized activities feel disconnected from their evolving interests. For others, participation is limited by geography or seasonality - many facilities are concentrated in the city center, and Porvoo’s cold winters and coastal weather often discourage outdoor play. Even with average income levels, high living costs can make paid hobbies out of reach for many families.

In response to this challenge, our team: Anssi Moilanen, Katarina Blind, Mila Coe, Sam Klemets, Yuzu Nakamura, and Yuchong Zhang set out to find ways to help youth (age 9-18) in Porvoo self-organize their hobbies. Since the infrastructure is already in place, the real challenge lies in sparking motivation and empowering youth to take initiative.

To expand our thinking, we embarked on a field research trip to Singapore in March. Why Singapore? We intentionally chose a location vastly different from Porvoo to gain fresh perspectives. Instead of looking at similar Nordic or Western cities, we wanted to explore what might emerge from observing an entirely different urban and cultural context.

Us arriving to Singapore

Singapore’s youth communities are densely packed, culturally diverse, and digitally connected. They showed us a different way of doing things. What stood out most was how young people there often shape their own recreational spaces and communities, using digital tools and peer networks. It was a powerful reminder that meaningful hobby participation doesn’t have to be top-down.

Our visit at Red Box Youth Center and at SCAPE - a non-profit youth organization in Singapore that provides a vibrant space and platform for young people to express themselves, develop their talents, and pursue their aspirations through creative, community, and entrepreneurial activities.

From this experience, we came to a central insight: for self-organized hobbies to flourish in Porvoo, young people must be given the means — and the trust — to take ownership. Facilities alone aren’t enough; behavioral change is key. And for behavior to shift, three things must be in place: motivation, opportunity, and competence.

With this in mind, we focused our efforts on designing a volunteering model that empowers already active youth to engage their peers, especially those at risk of falling through the cracks. By tapping into the social influence of existing hobbyists, we can indirectly reach the broader community. Our concepts were co-developed and validated with Porvoo’s youth through surveys and hands-on workshops.

Us working on the project and having POV workshop

We proudly presented our results at the Impact Gala on May 23, 2025, showcasing the outcomes of months of collaboration, creativity, and hard work. Our experience, enriched by an inspiring trip to Singapore and several deep dives in Porvoo, gave us new ways to think about youth engagement. Now, we hope our work will inspire action and help reshape how hobbies are supported in the lives of young people!