Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, is focused firmly on the future – a perspective that their web presence adheres to now as well.
Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, is focused firmly on the future – a perspective that their web presence adheres to now as well. The renewed, component-based Sitra.fi is an inspiring future media that seizes current phenomena and acts as a trendsetter for both expert audiences as well as normal citizens.
Making the future visible
Sitra is known as a reformer of the Finnish society and a forerunner of specialist communication. However, in honor of 100-year-old Finland and Sitra’s 50th anniversary, Sitra wanted to bring future communication closer to all citizens. At the end of the day, the future belongs to all of us.
Although scientific research and expertise have suffered from inflation lately, there has never been more demand for data content than now. The goal for Sitra’s new website was clear from the beginning: to be the most significant site in Finland for data and research pertaining to the future.
This goal, along with the brand redesign by Exove Design, was an excellent starting point for working on Finland’s most important future media.
A turning point in working models
Although concepting web services and defining strict page templates traditionally go hand in hand, the supporting theme of Sitra’s site renewal was the creation of components that could be used on each page on the site. These versatile components, based on content needs, acted as the building blocks of the new site, giving content providers the freedom to build diverse pages based on Sitra’s and its innumerable partners’ differing needs.
During the joint project the traditional client–provider relationship was also put to the test. From the beginning, a Scrum team formed by our designers and developers worked at Sitra’s office in a very tight-knit community with the client’s project team. As a sum of the continuous cooperation, two week sprints and shared goals, the beautiful, user-friendly and above all future-proof Sitra.fi was born.
“In modern expert communications, being serious and using obscure official language no longer equals credibility. With the entire world focusing more on communications, the toughest expert is all of a sudden the one that has the guts to speak in an an intelligible manner and bring forth their own personality from behind their expertise. The new Sitra.fi takes the opportunity provided by this change. We invite our readers to get to know the phenomena of the future, as well as the people and the solutions behind them. We work harder than ever to express things in a simple manner, making sure not to hide behind unnecessary formality,” sums up Laura Halenius, the digital communications lead and editor-in-chief of the online services of Sitra.