Digital experience on cross-sectoral cooperation and participation for Turku city employees

The focus of the Turku pilot is communication. The aim is to find ways to communicate about health and wellbeing services, and that way help city residents to make choices that support their health and wellbeing. Also, our goal is to encourage city residents to participate in the decision-making. To reach a sustainable result, Turku has approached these challenges from different angles. Turku targeted residents directly and worked with city employees and NGOs providing services for them. The game developed within the Healthy Boost project supports the latter approach.

– The game aims to encourage city employees to improve cross-sectoral cooperation, pay attention to communication and involve city residents in decision-making, tells Eeva Hämäläinen who works as a project coordinator in the city of Turku. 

The game was implemented on the Seppo game platform and developed together with a company called Lentävä Liitutaulu.

The game is based on the model created in the Healthy Boost project  

The core elements of the game are real stories of cross-sectoral collaboration collected from city employees and the model of cross-sectoral cooperation created in the Healthy Boost project. For content creation, experiences gathered on co-creation workshops, questionnaire of city employees and short interviews with city and NGO representatives has been utilized.

– To make the gameplay more interesting and interactive, we produced videos based on those stories. We are confident, that videos inspire players to reflect on their own experiences on similar matters. Some of the tasks of the game are quite exciting, for example, the team gets to write a poem about successful collaboration, says Hämäläinen. 

The game has been tested with a team whose work involves cross-sectoral collaboration. In test rounds a lot of feedback was given and based on the comments, the game has been further improved. The co-creation tool will be launched after the model for cross-sectoral cooperation is finalized.