Time: December 10, 2025, at 15:00 – 17:30
Place: Viikki Think Company venue (Latokartanonkaari 3) + after-chill at CoolHead Brew (Koetilantie 1).
For whom: Students (and others) interested in food security and personal fulfilment in an unsure future.
Registration link:
Registration DL: December 5, 2025 (if places still left.)
People are increasingly interested in alternative life paths—especially given the growing difficulty of finding “proper jobs”, which are often dependent on economic growth (capital-intensive), environmentally harmful (energy- and material-intensive), and personally unfulfilling (“bullshit jobs”). However, in our productivist society, it is often difficult to know what one truly wants, finding a delicate balance between self-preservation (maintaining one’s own well-being while providing care for loved ones) and self-realization (pursuing purpose and connection in the world).
This event invites participants (no matter what stage in their lives/careers) to explore novel ways to search for the balance. It presents a case of micro-entrepreneurships in urban farming in Viikki and offers a workshop empowering participants to collaboratively and creatively explore how to align macro-scale post-growth aspirations with personal post-career desires.
For the workshop, three self-provisioning practitioners with distinct, alternative life paths beyond conventional careers will share their thoughts and experiences.
Through guided reflection and the envisioning exercise, participants can begin to conceptualize and articulate their own visions of alternative livelihoods, including ways of growing and provisioning food.
After the workshop discussions continue at CoolHead Brew taproom.
Milka Keihäs is a 35-year-old wonderer, gardener and musician who has traveled a long way looking for her place. For a year she has finally settled on a homestead in Nauvo, Turku archipelago and is slowly building the garden in the direction of a food producing ecosystem. Milka is curious about exploring a simple yet creative human life in the countryside as a symbiotic part of the surrounding nature and local community as one potential solution to the multidimensional challenges of the modern world. She wishes to inspire others too to seek, try out and find one's own way to exist in the world and believes in the human potential to guard, nourish and repair our environment.
NOW: Free soul. All heart forest guy.
EARLIER: Ex supermarket manager. Ex ecoshop keeper. Ex companion food partner. Ex recreating farmer. Ex manager of futures. Ex pedagog-cultivator.
Inkeri Aula is a researcher-artist, aspiring for utopian niches both in current academy and living environments. Involved with Livonsaari community village since its founding in 2005, she lives in a self-made cottage house in the Turku archipelago with her family, reading and writing about the pluriverse. Her current job is researching stories and experiences related to ancient heritage sites at Aalto Visual Communication Design research group (AVCD) in Aalto University, Finland. Cultural anthropologist PhD.
This workshop is organized by Viikki Food Design Factory, Professor Michiru Nagatsu & PhD researcher Riina Bhatia, and supported by the Viikki Innovation Campus project (co-funded by the City of Helsinki) and the Food SystemiCity programme (co-funded by the European Union).