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Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen is professor of Craft Studies at the University of Helsinki, Department of Teacher Education. She is also docent at Aalto University.

Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen has built her research program on the development and application of cognitive theories of design processes.  The main focuses of the overall 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 ten 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. The role of scaffolding in craft education settings, both scaffolding in social interaction as well as that mediated by material artifacts has been focus of her research. She has carried out three larger research projects funded by Academy of Finland: Facilitating Social Creativity through in Collaborative Designing 2003-2006 and Learning by Collaborative Designing 2007-2010 that both focused on computer supported collaborative learning. She was Principal Investigator in  Handling Mind: Embodiment, Creativity and Design – research project funded by Academy of Finland 2013-2016. Recently she is working in Laboratory of Co-inquiry, co-design, co-teaching, and co-regulation (Co4-Lab)  project (PI Kai Hakkarainen, coPIs Jari Lavonen, Katariina Salmela-Aro, Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen) funded by Academy of Finland. The newest consortion project is Innokomp: Innovation competences, co-creation, digital modeling and multimateriality (2017-2019) funded by OKM.