Hi, my name is Seungho Lee, a doctoral candidate in the department of design at Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland. I am the author and responsible teacher of the 10-ECTS Design for Government (DfG) course under Aalto Creative Sustainability master’s programme. In DfG, we work with the real problems commissioned by the Finnish government with the help of systems approach, empathic design and behavioural insight.

Beef Finland 2012 was a result of my master’s thesis in which I had attempted to investigate the problem of beef production and consumption worldwide and in Finland. The supervisor for my master’s thesis was Marco Steinberg of Snowcone & Haystack, the former director of the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra.

The intent was to present a problem defining model that combines systems approach and behavioural insight using beef as a case, which has become a big part of the syllabus for DfG.

So what’s beyond Beef Finland? I am not sure yet. One thing for sure is that perfecting the model is an ongoing process – now with DfG and later with other projects – and it will be a good idea to leave this project here and revisit every once in a while.

Do you want to take this project as a starting point to investigate your country’s beef problem? You are free to copy, remix, and extend the content here using a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. This website will remain in place until at least the end of 2015.

Before you do, I should admit that I have made some critical mistakes not being a nutritional scientist or a Finnish native speaker although I have done my best meeting a number of experts to fact-check: the association between chronically high protein intake and bone loss seems to be still in question; the total cost of diabetes in Finland is comparable to 10% of the annual state budget (not the 10% of the budget is spent for diabetes).

However, I do not believe that these withdraw the basis for the proposals. Beef consumption still is a big issue and it contributes to all of those problems.

Enjoy!