I have always justified my choice of career by my need to influence society: the great social problems of our time, in particular climate change, loss of biodiversity and diminishing natural resources, are in need of solutions. If something can give meaning to life, it is solving grand challenges like these.

If I had started to work on these same issues ten years earlier, I would have definitely done many things differently. In the late 1990s, influencing society was supposed to take place in a more straightforward way through politics and the media. You had to get important issues on television and the front page and from there they went on to Parliament and government ministers.

The new millennium has changed the status quo, and thereby also changed how Demos Helsinki operates. Many new venues and strategies to influence society have been added alongside politics and mainstream media: the internet and social media have created new groups as well as new ways to influence society that unite these groups, entrepreneurship is seen as a way to change the world, and the threshold for people to start online campaigns and cultural projects has been lowered. I see my work as evaluating the impact of the different methods used to influence society. I try to see how social change can be engineered and how the tools used to achieve it work together. The insight gained from this should guide our choice of themes and projects at Demos Helsinki.

Of course, many others are dealing with the same questions of future societal change and influence. That is probably why so many people are always applying to work with us: people want to do meaningful work on important issues.