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NODUS researchers undertake transdisciplinary design research for sustainable futures.
NODUSians

Dr. İdil Gaziulusoy
NODUS Leader
Associate Professor, Sustainable Design
İdil Gaziulusoy’s research is situated within the emerging area of design for sustainability transitions. She is interested in the new ways of designing and the agencies enabled, enacted and embodied by design that emerge in transformations/transitions contexts.
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Dr. Mikko Jalas
Associate Professor, Co-Innovating for Circular Solutions
Mikko Jalas is an Associate professor of Co-Innovating for Circular Solutions. His research interests include sustainable consumption, time use and societal rhythms, as well as climate change mitigation and design for sustainability transformations.
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Dr. Tatu Marttila
Senior Lecturer
tatu.marttila[at]aalto.fi
I'm a design teacher and researcher interested in how design activities can become an effectual part in facilitating sustainability transitions. With a background in industrial and strategic design and in new media, I'm currently working as a senior lecturer on Design for Sustainability at Department of Design in Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture.
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Dr. Katie Berns
Postdoctoral researcher
Katie is a postdoctoral researcher working on a European project to make carbon emissions data accessible and actionable for policymakers and communities. Her work bridges climate science and urban policymaking, designing tools that drive informed, inclusive climate action.
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Dr. Hella Hernberg
Postdoctoral researcher
Hella Hernberg is an architect and postdoctoral researcher striving for resource wisdom and socio-ecological sustainability in urban and built environments. Her research focuses on the intermediation of complex socio-political processes to advance the care and revitalization of existing spaces and properties as part of urban sustainability transformations.
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Dr. Gloria Lauterbach
Postdoctoral researcher
Gloria Lauterbach is an artistic researcher with a PhD in Arts from Aalto University. Gloria specializes on urban habitation strategies in times of polycrisis in general and the question on how to reconceptualize anthropogenic infrastructures (such as lighting infrastructures) in particular.
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Dr. Sara Lindeman
Postdoctoral researcher
Sara Lindeman conducts action research on ecological communication and decision-making. Her work explores how living systems principles can inform the emergence of societal infrastructures rooted in distributed, mutual learning. Through Leapfrog Projects, a think-and-do tank she co-initiated, she engages with both cultural transformation and technological experimentation. Her inquiry bridges systems innovation, collective intelligence, and the conditions for life-alignment in complex social systems. She is particularly interested in how multi-intelligence processes—including human and machine collaboration—can support regenerative forms of coordination, sense-making, and decision-making.
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Dr. Sini Numminen

Kata Fodor
Doctoral researcher
Kata is an architect whose PhD addresses how food system challenges can be addressed by design, and how spatial practitioners can meaningfully contribute to the facilitation of sustainable diets.
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Talvikki Kollmann
Doctoral researcher
Talvikki’s doctoral research explores how knowledge work is organized in post pandemic Finland. By exploring the hybrid work practices and experiences of Finnish knowledge workers, she uncovers what work designs emerge and will be needed long-term.
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Maria Ferreira Litowtschenko
Doctoral researcher
maria.ferreiralitowtschenko[at]aalto.fi
Maria Ferreira's research focuses on design in the public sector, especially in experimental institutional forms like public innovation labs. The aim is to understand the interactions and collaborations between various actors seeking to influence governance, particularly in the Latin American context.
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Sonja Nielsen
Doctoral researcher
sonja.nielsen[at]aalto.fi
Sonja’s dissertation critically examines and further develops knowledge co-production methods in environmental governance, empirically focusing on the Transition Arena method in Finland. She is especially interested in understanding how social impacts emerge in these settings and how they connect to environmental policy processes as participatory experiments.
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Tomi Rantanen
Doctoral researcher
Tomi Rantanen’s research is focused on provoking gender equality transitions in music. He aims to discover how systemic design and transition arenas can facilitate change towards feminist futures.
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Delphine Rumo
Doctoral researcher
Delphine Rumo's doctoral research focuses on sustainable construction. In her research, she investigates communities of practice that restructure conventional economic spaces towards post-development economies.
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Saga-Sofia Santala
Doctoral researcher
Saga-Sofia Santala's interdisciplinary doctoral research explores the potential of engaging close social communities in creating transitions towards more sustainable mobility practices. Through constructive design research in citizens' everyday lives, it demonstrates ways in which social communities shape (un)sustainable mobility practices and draws implications for socially informed mobility intervention design.
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Tommi Vasko
Doctoral researcher
Tommi Vasko is a researcher, designer, and organizer whose doctoral research examines live action role-playing in the context of the politics of sustainability transitions.
Find Tommi’s publications here