Two Laurea Student Teams Working Together to Promote the Employment of Immigrant Women
Two Laurea University of Applied Sciences Business student’s project teams worked together to promote the employment of immigrant women through the CeMeWE-project in the spring semester on 2024. This blog text is written by the students, reflecting on their process.
The final objective of this research project was to help our client CeMeWE to reach its goal of finding ways to support the employment of immigrant women in Finland, Sweden, Estonia and Latvia. The way of working on the project was a new concept for many team members, as our research project consisted of two project teams with the above-mentioned common goal, but also with project-specific sub-goals serving each other. The Service Design team´s goal was to identify different personas and their motives regarding employment, and the Digital Marketing project aimed to create a digital marketing strategy and materials to reach immigrant women based on the results of the Service Design project. Both project teams were international, as we had two exchange students from Mexico and Poland. Internationality offered us a great opportunity to learn English and about new cultures.
Our contact person at CeMeWE was Hilkka Lydén and we had meetings with her every month. To facilitate collaboration between the two project teams, we used a method called “Hot wash ups”, where the teams shared what they had done for the project in the previous week. In addition, a visual and digital workspace, Miro, allowed members to see in real time what each team had come up with.
Integrating AI to Enhance Communication and Creativity
The project has been allowed, or even encouraged, to use AI in its work. At this point it is interesting to pause for a moment to compare, to look back for just a short time and see that this project has been for many of its members like a gateway from an AI-skeptical attitude to an AI-positive and boldly curious attitude. The project’s promotion to AI has been timely and in line with the evolution of general attitudes.
As we know, uncertainty causes fears, and this also applies to attitudes towards AI. Perhaps there is a need to define what AI is. AI can be defined as a system that, based on a given set of data and by analyzing its environment, can make decisions with limited autonomy to achieve given goals. Compared to humans, it has a superior memory and the ability to process it at a speed that humans could never achieve. However, it always needs an impulse from a human and, unfortunately, its outputs can contain confusing errors. So, humans are always needed to evaluate, correct and accept AI’s creations. This is what we learned and proved through experience in our work.
The project team tested different AI tools with an experimental attitude. There was already a good level of trust in the DeepL translator, which makes heavy use of AI to produce high-quality translations. With DeepL, we were able to quickly get Finnish-language sources available for also the exchange students in the project and ensure the accuracy of English-language texts, for example, when writing scientific article and producing marketing materials.
The aim of creating target marketing personas is to create a character that is as easy to understand as possible and to make the persona more concrete to make it easier to produce targeted marketing. The key discovery of the project was to use speech-generating and vividly articulating videos to visualize the target personas. The videos were generated using the D-ID AI tool. The free image generator DALL-E3 and Leonardo.ai, which requires paid tokens, were used to produce the marketing materials. A more familiar program, the AI-based Canva, was an important tool for combining images into marketing graphics.
Producing images and videos with AI can sound like a process where stunning visual creations appear almost by themselves, with just the push of a button. In a way, it does, but just pressing one button isn’t quite enough. For AI to know what you want, you need to know how to ask for it correctly. These request words are called prompt-texts. In summary, creating visualizations took time to learn, but the end results were quite nice pictures and videos, and a slightly more advanced prompter’s skill for visual producers.
Creating Personas for CeMeWe Focus Groups
The Service Design team created personas for three focus groups based on research and interviews. Each focus group had different pain points, motivations, goals, and needs, resulting in the creation of three distinct personas for each group. Focus group 1 needed light support, for example mentoring for making CV, improving networking skills and learning language. For focus group one, project teams planned networking event and community for immigrant women. Focus group 2 is more like retraining and capacity building. This focus group personas had challenges like integrating to Finnish culture, finding own path or study new education, and for this group was developed personal tutoring, job seminar and connection support group. The last group needed the most support because it included domestic and societal barriers. Focus group 3 personas struggled with getting citizenship, having local social support, becoming independent and educating nurse practitioner. To help these personas, project members invented courses for education and IT-skills, and events for social networking and improving language.
The purpose of these personas is to deeply understand and empathize with the focus groups, aiding in the visualization and comprehension of their diverse perspectives and needs. From above, you’ll find the final images for the personas that were created with an AI tool named D-ID. Using tools like D-ID made the personas look more humanlike. These images become powerful tools that inform and help us stay focused on meeting the real needs and desires of our focus group. This AI tool provided a visual representation of the personas through their research and analysis.
Writing A Scientifical Article During the Project
During the project, the team had the privilege of collaborating with the lecturer to write a scientific article focusing on the integration of AI into the project. This concept was presented at last year’s autumn project conference, with the idea of replacing the traditional knowledge base writing. The team assigned two article officers who were tasked with assembling writers and selecting a topic for the article.
To decide the topic for the article, the article officers gathered the project team and engaged the entire team in the ideation process. Following extensive brainstorming sessions, the team agreed to write about the implementation of AI in the creation and visualization of target groups since AI was used in the project. After deciding on the topic, the article officers, along with a few co-writers, began researching and working on the article. Articles will be presented at the Project Conference at Laurea Hyvinkää campus on 7th May 2024.
In the end, the project team consisted of two teams working together. Through collaborative efforts, all work and research were unified towards the common goal of empowering immigrant women in the workforce. The team´s positive experience in learning to collaborate while working towards a meaningful cause while studying will stay with them as they move forward with newfound knowledge, skills, and a deeper understanding of the power of teamwork and AI. The Service Design and Digital Marketing team members collaborated closely as one team throughout the project until finalizing the final report and creating impactful end products for our client.
