Mirko Wittka

2021     Work @ Sensity

Design Consultant     Since 2017, I work as a strategic design consultant and researcher for Sensity SARL, Cologne/Luxembourg. Following the company's vision of horizontal change, we enact design-led and action-oriented research approaches with partners and clients, ranging from corporations to NGOs to municipalities - thereby restructuring internal processes and external portfolios towards humans. My involvement ranges from value-driven future studies to developing and facilitating human-centric strategies to creating visual and actionable tools and prototypes.

2020     MA Thesis in Creative Sustainability

Designed Agency in Collaborations     Overshadowed by a vast momentum in advanced digitalisation and predicted progress, societal questions of human dignity and democratic participation in anticipation of futures are fading out of attention. My research takes a critical perspective on AuroraAI, the Finnish national programme for artificial intelligence. By developing a humane lens of design, the study constructively investigates barriers in the collaborative development and their relation to actors and their respective agency, while taking into account normative aspects inherent to questions of fair participation in the creation of public good and joint futures.

2019     Capstone Course in Creative Sustainability

Compensate     Even though not the only important one, carbon emissions are the most en vogue topic in mainstream sustainability. While reducing them in the first place is much desirable, compensating those emissions that cannot yet be avoided could benefit our planet. In this course, our group drew out a sequential future pathway for Compensate®, a young Finnish foundation advocating and capacitating carbon emission compensation. The suggested long-term goal expanded beyond the mere act of compensation and aimed for Compensate®'s active role in advancing regulatory and socio-political means for increased socio-environmental sustainability beyond philanthropy.

2019     Design for Government Course

Aurora: A Network for Trust     Taking a consultative stand, this group project aimed to reorientate AuroraAI, the Finnish programme for artificial intelligence. Throughout the programme's development, attention should focus on maintaining a high level of trust between Finnish citizens and the government. We suggested AuroraAI become actively designed by Finnish society. Through this shift towards a human-driven paradigm, people's will should become manifested in this new, AI-enabled service ecosystem through a co-created 'declaration of trust' as its organising set of principles. This project then became the starting point for my MA thesis.

2018     Values in Design Futures Course

Do Androids Dream of Sustainability     Against the conventional notion of the future being unknown, humans instead already project ideas, wishes, and anxieties into it. In return, these influence the present, bringing me to questions about with what and how we want to pre-populate the future, questions on the values we want the future to represent. Design plays an increasingly important role in shaping scenarios for these futures between creating physical objects and complex systems. One outcome of this course is an textual investigation of future values depicted in Bladerunner and Bladerunner 2049.

2018     Sustainable Global Technologies Course

Nepali     During this university course, we decided to explore the relationship between communication means and knowledge adoption of sustainable recovery solutions in the aftermath of 2015's earthquakes in Nepal. Developing and executing this project required a continuous substantial reconsideration of processes, thoughts, and means between infrastructural and resource limitations, culture and language barriers, as well as emotional well-being and professionalism in crisis environments. The project got adopted into the EU-funded PBL South Asia programme. As a mentor, I supported and guided following students before and during their field trip to rural Nepal.

2018     EIT Climate-KIC Summer School

Plotfarm     Partaking in the EU's leading climate innovation initiative reminded me about the difficulty in rethinking systemic structures and breaking present mindsets. While supposedly aimed at advancing sustainability, the summer programme primarily promotes traditional growth-thinking and entrepreneurial mindsets with a "green" twist. Hence, my team's proposal towards decentralised food systems, focussing on small-scale farmers instead of profit and growth, wasn't that popular among the jury of angel investors and economists.

2017     Work @ Noto

Freelance Industrial Designer     Before starting my MA studies in a more abstract design field, I worked on various projects at Noto GmbH, Cologne. The work ranged from wellbeing-oriented studies for a global player in radiology to rethinking the future of optical fiber cable implementation, to everyday consumer objects for clients in Asia, the US, and Germany.

2016     BA Thesis in Industrial Design

Kontinuum     My industrial design studies equipped me with a curious and open mindset that addresses unknown problems in a strategically chaotic way. As a graduation project, I delved into the realm of medical instruments and designed a transport system for human organs. Thorough and hands-on research from various angles allowed me to grasp the focal point of a connected system between technological opportunities, medical constraints, as well as human needs and capabilities.