Maija Korpi-Filppula says that her interest in the topic stems from the combination of urban development and customer experience. Large urban projects are often discussed not only from the perspective of costs but also from the perspective of everyday functionality and usability. For example, the Logomo Bridge in Turku and the Redi in Kalasatama in Helsinki have sparked debate about how structures ultimately serve the everyday lives of users.
– Through this, I became interested in how urban space and large development projects are designed in relation to the everyday lives of users, and especially in how the perspective of residents is taken into account in project participation and planning processes. My interest was particularly accentuated because key design solutions are often permanent and affect everyday life far into the future.
– As a marketing student, I was interested in examining how customer experience and customer journey thinking perspectives could be applied to inclusive urban development projects. Urban development projects have traditionally been more of a technical design and engineering area, where user experience is not always examined as systematically as in service environments.
The research was conducted as a qualitative case study of the Pirkkala–Linnainmaa tram project. The project's participation materials were used as data to examine the structure of participation and the consideration of stakeholders.
The results show that customer journey thinking helps structure inclusion both as an organizational process and as the residents' everyday experience. The project organization's perspective is phased and process-focused, while the residents' experience is discontinuous and tied to everyday life.
The key observation is that inclusion does not appear as a uniform process experience, but is structured in different ways depending on the residents' everyday starting points. Customer journey thinking highlights the multi-level nature of inclusion, especially from the perspective of accessibility, timing and agency.
These factors help explain why the same opportunities for participation appear differently to different people. In this way, customer journey thinking complements traditional process thinking with a more customer-centric perspective. – It provides a tool to identify critical points of participation and develop more resident-oriented approaches in urban projects. It does not in itself solve the challenges of participation, but it helps to make them visible and structured. Systematic gathering of resident understanding can further support the targeting of participation, the development of communication and the design of processes that better reflect the reality of everyday life.