Project leader: Brit Ross Winthereik, Technical University of Denmark
Project duration: 2021-2024
Participating countries: Sweden, Denmark and Norway
Funding from NordForsk: 98,1416 EUR
Project website: sosproject.dtu.dk
The SOS project offered a comparative mapping of information-processing and communicative aspects of informal welfare work across three welfare sectors across three Nordic countries. The main ambition was to propose and prototype socio-digital innovations that enable synergy between informal welfare work and requirements of public authorities. Informal welfare work is unpaid support of citizens in his/her interactions with welfare state institutions and actors.
Key Findings
The project has provided a multi-sited ethnography within Denmark, Sweden and Norway and a survey among public sector employees across these countries. The research has shown that the relative success of public sector digitalisation in the Nordic countries depends on a large amount of “informal welfare work”. The current digital public infrastructures are not universal and inclusive, and significant support work is supplied by both formal and informal helpers – family, volunteer citizens, and frontline workers in the public sector. For instance, nurses, teachers, and other employees offer support also outside of their working hours or core responsibilities. These helpers are largely unacknowledged in current policy and design practices.
Based on these findings, SOS argues that:
- Policymakers and designers must protect and anticipate in-person support to prevent widening social inequalities through digitalization. Also the helpers must be acknowledged and supported.
- Policies and design processes must consider problems and breakdowns as an opportunity to learn and improve. Feedback loops that bring citizens’ experience to the decisionmakers should be considered a critical element of universal digital infrastructures.
- Digital welfare infrastructures across Denmark, Sweden and Norway are not universal, thus the countries direly need more focus on inclusive design and universal design approaches to develop inclusive public digital infrastructures.
Impact story
A side effect of digitalisation is that it can inadvertently create inequality. Project leader Brit Ross Winthereik cites an example from Norway, where a group of researchers conducted fieldwork among immigrants who are in contact with the Norwegian healthcare services. The challenge for those immigrants is that the language and the digital user interface create barriers for them, as they must understand the professional medical language, the Norwegian language, and not least the digital language. The consequence has been that the immigrants largely seek online communication with the healthcare services in their home countries.
“So, it’s not that people in this group aren’t digital, because they actually use digital platforms to access the health services they need. But it can create inequality if digitalisation leads to barriers that are too high, which means that some citizens are worse off than others. However, we don’t know enough about this type of situation, which is why it’s important to make extra efforts to get to the bottom of it,” Winthereik explains.
Key outputs
Brown, K. (2025): Connected yet excluded: how change in national context contributes to digital exclusion for immigrants to Norway. Scandinavian Conference for Information Systems.
Carreras, B. N. (2024). Frictional infrastructures: An ethnography of compulsory digital self-reliance and collective access in the Danish welfare state (PhD dissertation). IT University of Copenhagen.
Carreras, B.N, & Winthereik, B.R (2023). “Narrating Digital Access, Trauma, and Disability Through Comics and Image Description in Denmark”. Medical Anthropology, 42(8), 787-814.
Wintereik, B.R., Aanestad, M., Mäkitalo, Å (2024): Digital Inclusion, DJØF Forlag.
Winthereik, B. R. (2024). “The citizen from hell: Experiencing digitalization”. In J. Perriam & K.
M. Kjær (Eds.), Digitalization in practice: Intersections, implications and interventions (Vol. 14, pp. 109–124). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
Winthereik, B.R., Carreras, B.N., Aanestad, M. (2023) “Putting People at the Centre of Digital Welfare Services: Towards a socially sustainable Nordic Region”. Fast Track to Vision 2030. NordForsk policy brief
Åberg, M., Lundin, M., Bergviken Rensfeldt, A., & Mäkitalo, Å. (2024). “The invisible professional helper: Encounters at the digital frontline of public education”. In 5th Street level Bureaucracy Conference, June 18-20 in Copenhagen