Insights make sense of complexity. Through interdisciplinary research, they map the worlds of emerging behaviors, shifting meanings, and evolving value logics that reshape relevance and opportunity.

  • Cultural Insight and Analysis: Interpret emerging values, identities, symbolic meaning, and the cultural logics shaping relevance.

    Audience and Customer Understanding: Clarify needs, motivations, barriers, and behaviors with qualitative depth and real-world context.

    Market Opportunities and Value Creation: Identify new markets, revenue models, partnerships, and value-creation architectures.

    Future Mapping and Scenarios: Make sense of signals and patterns to explore plausible directions and strategic possibilities.

Insights Offering

  • New cultural meanings: To identify how meanings change, how identities form, and what narratives shape relevance. This clarifies the cultural currents your work belongs to and the role you can play within them.

    New human desires: To uncover the deeper transformations people seek and the emotional, social, and symbolic motivations that guide participation and decision making.

    New value logics: To reveal how value is now created, perceived, and exchanged, where cultural and financial value converge, and what makes new offerings compelling.

What Insights Reveal

  • Cultural interpretation and narrative sensing: Cultural analysis, semiotics, narrative mapping, and media scanning to interpret identities, symbols, tensions, and emerging story arcs.

    Human understanding and qualitative immersion: Applied ethnography, deep interviews, field observation, and embodied co-experiments to reveal motivations, frictions, and desires that are not yet articulated.

    Value architecture and ecosystem modeling: Analysis of market patterns, value architectures, and system dynamics to surface how value is created, exchanged, and sustained across networks of actors.

How to Uncover Insights

Working with brands, cultural institutions, and businesses to make sense of their worlds: human experience, cultural shift, and market dynamics.

  • Together with Iittala’s leadership, we defined a renewed brand purpose: “Inspiring better living.”

    Through cultural analysis and applied ethnography, we explored how the brand can meaningfully contribute to everyday life in ways that reflect Nordic values and contemporary needs.

    At the core is The Map of Better Living, a systemic insight framework that identifies five opportunity areas: coexisting with nature at home, creating sanctuary, belonging together, living with clarity, and growing as a person. Each area is grounded in values such as humanity, autonomy, sustainability, equity, and trust.

    This approach shifts Iittala from timeless objects to timely transformation. It positions the brand to support people in cultivating more balanced, joyful, and purposeful lives, while enabling coherent, insight-driven growth across products, services, and experiences.

Iittala
Map of Better Living

Iittala Map of Better Living
Iittala Map of Better Living
Iittala Map of Better Living

Doing original research that examines how culture, technology, and value creation are evolving.

  • I’ve spent the past year exploring these strategies through our work with institutions like The New Architecture and Design Museum, Kiasma, Ateneum, Amos Rex, Helsinki Biennial, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, and beyond.

    The distillation resulted three core strategies: To remain relevant and resilient, you must go broader by worlding cultural worlds. deeper with cultural gravity, and longer through changing lives.

    Each strategy includes six strategic plays, illustrated with examples and grounded in a case study from our work.

    Download your copy of Cultural Codex 01 below.

Cultural Codex 01
Emerging value logics, 2026

A black background with white text reading 'Cultural Codex 01'. Small text at the top says 'Cultural Codex 01 — Broader, Deeper, Longer'. In the bottom right corner, there is a website URL: www.villetikka.com.
Black background with white text discussing the impact of low-quality content, cultural gravity, and deep engagement strategies for brands and experiences.
A beige sofa set with four women sitting and talking in a room with wooden bookshelves. The scene appears to be in a library or a cozy reading space with warm lighting.

Translating insights into capability through talks, workshops, training, and mentoring.

  • The program introduced tools and frameworks from our Cultural Codex and Worlding methodology, helping participants understand cultural production as the building of broader worlds across mediums and time horizons. Through expert insight, collaborative exercises, and practical templates, teams learned how to sense emerging trends, model future opportunities, and apply cross-disciplinary approaches to business and creative development.

    The training equipped media and creative companies with shared concepts, practical tools, and future-mapping templates to explore new partnerships, formats, and value creation models in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Fusion Labs
Mutating Worlds of Creative Industries, 2025

Title page with the text "The Mutating Worlds of the Creative Industries" and a small label "poem" at the bottom right corner, with a web address "www.poem.company" at the top right corner.
A promotional poster for the film 'Monad' by Dana Dawud, showing the screening date in Los Angeles on November 7th, with a list of cast members and creative team, featuring an abstract, illuminated face graphic.
A collage of digital screens and two printed T-shirts featuring the artwork and branding of Cloudy Heart, AI musical artist, by Jon Rafman. The screens display  platform, social media profile, cryptocurrency trading chart.
  • The training program explored three strategic shifts shaping the field today: museums as media, services as core offerings, and mission as the operational foundation.

    Through keynote sessions, practical frameworks, and shared experimentation, participants learned to reimagine audience relationships, prototype culture-led service ecosystems, and cultivate partnerships that sustain impact in a shifting world.

    Each module focused on a core shift identified in our Museum Futures framework: Museums operating as media organizations, Services as core cultural and financial infrastructure, and Mission as a strategic driver for programming, partnerships, and governance.

Finnish Museums Association
Museum Futures, 2025

Text overlay on a photo of a modern interior space with large windows and ceiling equipment. The text discusses media, storytelling, interconnected ecosystems in entertainment, gaming, museums, and digital formats, emphasizing the importance of building interconnected media systems and experiences.
Interior of Café du Palais at Palais de Tokyo with people sitting at tables, wall art on the left, large windows with visible trees outside, and black hanging pendant lights.
Text overlay on an abstract, dimly lit background discusses the concept of the 'phantom power of art,' describing how art is socially and economically intertwined and how structural critique can lead to new modes of cultural and governance models.

Writing on strategy, strategic design, and business transformation.

  • The Circular Design Guidebook provides models, frameworks, actionable instructions, and real-world examples for designing sustainable and regenerative solutions. One product, service, and business model at a time.

    The guidebook is aimed for leaders, product and service developers, and design professionals looking to understand and apply the fundamentals of circular design.Circular Design Guidebook

Circular Design Guidebook
With Design Forum Finland, 2025

Cover page of a book titled "Circular Design Guidebook" with a yellow background and black text, including a list of chapters and a line drawing of people working with design tools.

Insights Clients and Work

Client Work
AltiaMarket Opportunity, Foresight, Customer Insights
Business FinlandForesight, Market Opportunity
Confederation of Finnish IndustriesInsights, Foresight
City of HelsinkiForesight
Dottir LawInsights, Training
European CommissionForesight, Research
Growth CollectiveForesight, Training
Humak & CreveInsights, Foresight, Training
Finnish Chamber of CommerceInsights, Research
Finnish Cultural Institute in New YorkInsights, Research
Finnish Museums AssociationForesight, Insights, Training
Fusion LabsInsights, Foresight, Training
HelenForesight
Helsinki BiennialCustomer Insights
IittalaCustomer Insights, Research, Ethnography
KONEStrategy Training
Ministry of Economic Affairs and EmploymentForesight, Insights
Municipality & SMBsMarket Opportunity, Research
NokiaForesight, Market Opportunity, Customer Insights, Research, Ethnography
OP BankForesight, Insights, Research
ReaktorForesight, Insights, Research
Senate PropertiesInsights, Research
St1Foresight, Research
SuuntoForesight, Insights
The Finnish Youth Housing Association NALCustomer Insights, Research, Ethnography
UN Global PulseInsights, Training
Yle – Finnish Broadcasting CompanyForesight, Insights
YTK FundMarket Opportunity, Foresight, Customer Insights, Research, Ethnography