Tarja is a cofounder and core team member of SDN Finland. Since 2012, SDN Finland has become one of the most active and proportionally biggest national chapter of the network. SDN Finland has been awarded for Best members relations (2017), Excellent event organization (2018), and Best members relations (2019).

Tarja is a long-time service design enthusiast, having attended most of the global conferences since the first one in 2008. Promoting service design locally and globally, learning about new advancements in the field and getting people connected around service design are inspiring for her.

As her daytime job she teaches service design and related skills at Laurea University of Applied Sciences. Laurea’s Master’s degree programme in Service Innovation and Design has globally been the first multidisciplinary degree programme combining service business and service design competences, and it continues to be in the forefront in this field. Service design is an integral part of most of the curricula at Laurea. Tarja currently also works on her doctoral dissertation studying culture’s role in service design.