Empathy in Action.
Impact by Design.
Strategic advisory at the intersection of service performance, trust, and inclusion.
Services shape how people experience organizations and ultimately, whether they trust them.
Empact works with leadership teams to understand how services function in practice across different user realities. We identify where journeys create friction, confusion, or unintended barriers, and how those patterns influence engagement, trust, and long-term performance.
We combine inclusive, human-centered design and strategic foresight. The result is clear, structured insight that supports confident decision-making across digital, physical, and hybrid services.
Test how inclusive your service is
How well does your service take different users into account?
Take a 3-minute quick scan and get an assessment of your service’s level of inclusivity.
Why Empact?
Calm, structured guidance in complex systems
We help organizations navigate services, governance, and human realities. We also focus on making complex service systems understandable. Allowing leadership teams to act with confidence.
Inclusion that improves outcomes
When services work for people who face barriers, they tend to work better for everyone, improving usability, reach, and trust.
A structured way of working
We bring a clear process, defined phases, and concrete outputs. This makes our work easy to engage with and easy to act on.
Inclusive design
Equity is at the heart of our design process, not just at the level of speech, but in action. In practice, this means a particularly inclusive way of working, often with marginalized groups at the centre.
Sensitivity to marginalized groups
We have extensive experience in involving marginalized groups in our work and have a sensitive and respectful approach. We have experience working with migrants and refugees, young people and unemployed people, among others.
How we help organizations
We support organizations at different levels, from understanding how services perform, to enabling change and embedding new ways of working.
Our approach is inclusive and collaborative: we involve stakeholders and beneficiaries throughout the design process. This is how we ensure that the services and solutions we design are equitable, innovative and appealing to those they are intended to serve.
16-Week service performance, trust & inclusion assessment
A fixed-scope engagement focused on one critical service. It provides a structured understanding of how the service performs, where key challenges exist, and what to do next.
Phase 1: Framing the system
Clarifying goals, stakeholders, and service structure.
Phase 2: Understanding experiences
Mapping journeys and gathering real user insight.
Phase 3: Identifying patterns
Analyzing friction, barriers, and performance gaps.
Phase 4: Defining the way forward
Clear roadmap and executive-level recommendations.
Outcome:
– Clear view of how the service performs in practice
– Identified improvement areas with real user insight
– Prioritized actions aligned with organizational goals
– A structured foundation for further development
Service design with equity at the center
- Understanding and improving services at a system level
- Inclusive and human-centered design as a strategic method
- Customer and user insight to inform decision-making
- Designing and validating new service concepts
Capability & change support
- Building capability for inclusive and effective services
- Turning insight into concrete action across teams
- Aligning ways of working and decision-making
- Panel discussions and expert talks
- Service design trainings and sparring
Organizational development
- Co-creating strategies, visions, and ways of working
- Strengthening structures that support innovation, experimentation and learning
- Developing processes and action plans for sustained change
Our work
Startup Refugees
Startup Refugees develops solutions that strengthen migrants’ access to employment and entrepreneurship. As part of the ESR+-funded Diverse Talents project, the organization built a training model focused on workplace diversity, aimed at helping companies strengthen their inclusivity, non-discrimination, and welcoming practices. Empact served as an independent evaluation and development partner for the training model.
Association of Caribbean States
The Association of Caribbean States (ACS) brings together nations and territories of the Greater Caribbean to promote cooperation, dialogue, and coordinated action across the region. Empact supported the ACS in their strategic planning process through facilitating a High Level event and facilitating a strategic foresight workshop in Trinidad and Tobago in the spring of 2025.
Naistenkartano
Naistenkartano supports the wellbeing of women through peer-led groups and easy to access psychosocial services. As client needs have been growing more complex, the emotional load on staff has also increased. To assist with this, the organization partnered with Empact to strengthen internal support structures and reimagine how their work is organized.
Nicehearts Neighborhood Mothers
Neighborhood Mothers is a network of volunteer women who support immigrant women in promoting community, integration, and inclusion. Although the activities are already well-established, Neighborhood Mothers wanted to develop their processes, improve the quality of training and communication, and strengthen the volunteers’ ability to organize successful events.
Nuoret Lesket ry – Young Widows
Nuoret Lesket ry is an NGO in Finland, providing peer support, counseling and other services to young widows and their families. Empact facilitated a sparring session with the staff to help them take the first steps in developing a clearer, more accessible service path for people who have lost a partner and become widowers.
”We asked Empact to design and facilitate a service design workshop to help us identify challenges related to our program and find solutions to them. Michelle led an inspiring and efficient workshop for the Neighbor Mothers team and volunteers. After the workshop, we received a concise material package and recommendations for the next steps to achieve our goals. Thank you for the pleasant and seamless collaboration!”
– Anni Susineva, Neighborhood Mothers, Nicehearts
”I warmly recommend Anna and Michelle from Empact! They build up the development work with care and attention, create a good atmosphere and a clear way of working, and also take care of the follow-up in an exemplary manner. The whole process was handled from start to finish with great professionalism!”
– Anna Vuorio, Naistenkartano
”I can wholeheartedly recommend Empact. Working with Michelle is smooth, and the client is truly listened to. The work was completed quickly and efficiently. It’s clear that every client is important to them!”
– Niina Laaksonen, Hivpoint
”I participated in a workshop facilitated by Empact with my work community. We are undergoing an internal change in our working practices, which is challenging at times, and it was important at this stage to pause together on the themes we felt were important. Empact’s facilitators had built a solid workshop to support our reflections, which allowed us to explore different perspectives and develop creative solutions during the development day. The workshop enabled us to recognize the necessary actions and take the first steps on the path of change!”
– Workshop participant
”Anna and Michelle are amazing professionals who are a pleasure to work with. They bring strong methodological expertise, the ability to lead engaging and high-quality workshops, and an excellent understanding of how to include diverse groups. On top of that, they are incredibly flexible, creatively solving unexpected situations and developing innovative solutions to challenging problems. I highly recommend working with Anna and Michelle!”
– Päivi Korpela, Plan International
”Anna and Michelle are a diamond duo! The sparring session was inspiring and made our creative juices flow. Even in a short time, we achieved a lot! We even picked up some good tools for us to use in the future.”
– Sini Leppänen, Nuoret Lesket ry
Our team
Our team currently consists of two experienced service designers. Both of us bring a mix of social understanding and concrete design skills from several years of experience in different sectors. We have experience in engaging a diverse range of people and elevating the voices that often remain silent.
Michelle Sahal Estimé
I am a service designer who wants to make both digital and physical society more equitable, so it serves us all. I have worked with a wide range of equality related challenges and topics for over 14 years, in NGOs, at the United Nations, academia and most recently in an IT consulting firm. Since 2016, human-centred design has been an integral part of my work. My background in health and communications from the third sector gives me a strong foundation in helping NGOs, networks and small businesses to develop impactful and inclusive services. I am particularly inspired by projects where I can concretely include and engage minorities in the inclusive design process.
Anna Pyyluoma
I am a service designer who helps organisations work more effectively and understand how to respond to the needs of a changing world. I specialize in strategic planning, service design and change management. I am a skilled facilitator and I am passionate about working with social innovation. My dream project would be to participate in a future visioning project that empowers marginalized groups, helping organisations to adapt their activities to better meet the needs of everyone. I want to use my design skills to promote a sustainable future and inclusion.
Blog posts
Read our blog to find our newest posts related to Empact, inclusive design and other related interesting topics. Each post is written in both Finnish and English or only in English.
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The circular economy’s greatest untapped resource is the people it isn’t reaching yet
In early April, we had the chance to speak at Laurea’s Circular Economy Living Lab…
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Designing sustainable futures together
Reflections from Ornamo’s Sustainable Design Talks, by the event hosts Michelle Sahal Estimé and Anna…
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Kohti vaikuttavampaa kestävyyssiirtymää – monitieteisyys ja muotoilijan rooli muutoksen vauhdittajana
Anna Pyyluoma, Empactin toinen perustaja jatkaa Empactin kestävän kehityksen blogisarjaa, jossa pohditaan inklusiivisen muotoilun roolia…
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DEI under attack: Let’s go back to basics
Now that DEI as a concept is under attack globally, we think going back to…
How can we help you?
We’re Michelle and Anna, both experienced service designers specialized in inclusive design.
If you are responsible for a service and want a clearer understanding of how to develop it, how it performs, and where to focus next, we would be glad to explore it together.
We begin with a focused conversation and define whether a structured assessment would be useful in your context.