Industry Project 2024/2025: If Insurance

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Aug 11
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.

The fuels that kept the team thriving: Froosh smoothies and coffee (Both hot and iced).

Insurance is supposed to manage uncertainty. But what happens when we use uncertainty as a design tool instead of a threat to control?

That question became the spark for our six-month design journey with If, one of the leading Nordic insurance companies. Our mission? Explore how insurance could better serve digital natives, a group increasingly defined by their comfort with tech, discomfort with bureaucracy, and a healthy skepticism toward institutions that feel opaque and outdated.

We started with a simple brief, but quickly realized we were stepping into a much bigger, messier space. Between shifting customer expectations, regulatory unknowns like the upcoming Financial Data Access (FiDA) regulation, and emerging tech like AI and IoT, the insurance industry is facing its own moment of identity crisis. We decided to meet that chaos head-on, with curiosity and creativity.

Our team, a mix of designers, business thinkers, and even a chemical engineer, embraced the mess.

We interviewed digital natives and If stakeholders, mapped user journeys, explored legislative frameworks, and took a field trip to Singapore to learn from innovation leaders. We heard again and again how confusing, transactional, and distant insurance feels, especially to younger generations.

Visiting Insurance technology company Bolttech in Singapore & Start-up incubator in Singapore to hear more about the start-up ecosystem.

Spotting futuristic designs in Singapore and capturing ideas (and meeting deadlines) at Singapore airport.

But instead of trying to simplify uncertainty away, we treated it as an opportunity to respond to what digital natives were actually asking for: more clarity, more personalization, and more control.

Our exploration of the present and future of insurance.

Digital natives’ uncertainty about insurance policy coverage might feel like asking a magic 8 ball about the future.

We asked: What if insurance didn’t just sit in the background until something went wrong, but instead became a proactive tool people could understand, shape, and trust? How might policies feel more transparent, more tailored, and less like a one-size-fits-all safety net? These questions became the foundation for reimagining how insurance could work for people, not just around them.

Creative marketing material for our proposal, produced by Antti Ojala and Virva Brax.

That mindset led us to explore speculative futures and co-create bold new roles for If, not just as a product provider, but as a potential ecosystem player in a rapidly changing digital landscape. We didn’t land on a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, we prototyped a set of tools and ideas that turn insurance from a black box into a space for clarity, trust, and even empowerment.

Looking back, the journey was anything but linear. We navigated legal grey zones, technical rabbit holes, and more than a few existential design questions. But in the end, we discovered something powerful: uncertainty doesn’t have to be avoided. In fact, when embraced with the right mindset, it can be the most exciting design material of all.