Developmental work in Finnish universities of applied sciences (polytechnics) is mainly carried out in multi-professional R&D projects involving teachers, students and practitioners. Writing in the projects mainly manifests itself in the form of the final reports written by project managers, typically after the project has finished. Additionally, students write their final thesis on the basis of the guidelines for project reporting. As a result, teachers and students write apart from the project, but not within the project. The potential of writing in constructing the developmental work and its changing object has thus remained unused. The prevailing “report” genres have not made it possible to share the results gained in projects with other educational institutes, and especially with the employment sector. Writing is mainly interpreted in light of its exchange value: the cost and grades. Traditionally, the challenge of developing writing in European higher education has been met by organizing writing courses that aim at producing a kind of writing ability or strategy (Björk, Bräuer, Rienecker & Jörgensen 2003). The cultural-historical activity theory (Engeström 1987; 2005) turns attention away from the language of the text, or even the creative process of the authors, to the cultural-historical activities that texts mediate. Teachers and students do not “learn to write” or improve their writing in a general way outside the activity systems. Genres develop in a given activity and evolve as the activity evolves (Bazerman & Russell 2003). Genre is thus seen in local and dynamic terms (Spinuzzi 2003). In order to develop writing in universities of applied sciences, the following question has to be posed: How to bridge the gap between the project activity and writing? What kinds of tools and models are needed to interpret writing in light of its use value, in order to make the results of the projects operational for those professional groups and institutions that are interested in them and may use them?

Engeström (2008) has proposed a methodological approach called formative interventions, inspired by Vygotsky’s method of double stimulation (1978). My current study analyzes the process of formative interventions, conducted in a university of applied sciences. In this study, the first stimulus was offered by the interventionists in writing workshops, where teachers were helped to identify the problems of writing, analyze their root causes, and search for new solutions. The second stimulus was a visualization tool, named “Writing Plan” (Lambert 2008), which enables the long-term and negotiative planning of writing within projects. Participants were challenged to use the “Writing Plan” in the planning of writing in various multi-professional projects. My data consists of the ethnographic data collected in the study: videotaped discussions of project workshops in which writing was planned, texts in different formats that were produced by the project parties, and the discussions the texts aroused in various web-based discussion boards.

As a result of the formative interventions, I will present the new concept and model of “project writing” (Lambert 2009), referring to a co-configurative design (Engeström 2004) and production of multimodal texts (Hart-Davidson 2008) within multi-professional projects. The new model has emerged together with the agency of the participants, who were committed and have taken consequential actions (Engeström 2008) to change the writing activity in universities of applied sciences. The model of “project writing” can be seen as an intermediate, conceptual tool (Engeström 2005) for developing new writing genres inside projects, and “on the terms” of the texts. It has already encouraged the writers themselves to identify and define genres they use in their work, the methodological note suggested by Spinuzzi, Hart-Davidson & Zachry (2006). My study has shown that formative interventions can be seen as a mechanism of building novel concepts and agency in the context of higher education.