Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen

Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen is professor of Craft Studies at the University of Helsinki and docent at Aalto University. She has built her research program on the development and application of cognitive theories of design processes.  The main focuses of her research is to analyse expertise in design, the nature of the design process and the role of the external representations, i.e., visualisation and sketching in the design process. In recent years she has been mostly interested in analysing collaboration and communication in design projects, the nature of the distributed expertise and the theory of knowledge building. She has carried out three large research projects funded by Academy of Finland: Facilitating Social Creativity through in Collaborative Designing (2003-6), Learning by Collaborative Designing (2007-10), and Handling Mind: Embodiment, Creativity and Design (2013-16), where she was principal investigator. Recently she has been working in the Laboratory of Co-inquiry, co-design, co-teaching, and co-regulation (Co4-Lab) also funded by Academy of Finland. Her newest consortium projects are Innokomp: Innovation competences, co-creation, digital modeling and multimateriality (2017-19) funded by OKM, and MakerStudioPeda (2020-24).