Donation Pickup Service

About

Tags: Service Design

Date: Sept 2019 - Jan 2020

Duration: 14 weeks

Team Size: 6 (Technical design master students)

During the autumn of 2019, I developed a service concept for easing the process of donating old products in Sweden. This was the last project of my education before my master's thesis, where I got to apply my competences in an area of personal interest. The aim of the project was to develop something that increased the number of products being re-introduced into the circular system to enable value creation in Sweden. The project was done by a group of 6 master students, and I had the role of the team leader during the project.

Project Brief

The project was problem-oriented (i.e. we did not know what we were going to develop), and user-centered (i.e. the solution should be derived from an understanding of the user in relation to the described problem). The following quote is from the brief that we got:

“We keep products because we love them and because they add meaning to our lives. Although having an emotional attachment to things is not a bad thing, piling up objects in the storage kill their material and use-value. How could we design a service that would persuade people to let their unused products go to promote product longevity and material circulation?"

To clarify, the goal was to gather insights about why Swedes are keeping old products in their storage even when they no longer using them, and to develop a solution motivated by these insights. The purpose of this was to increase the longevity of products as part of a move from a linear to a circular economy.

Design Process

To arrive at a solution, a service-design process was used were spending time with potential users to better understand the context was of high priority. Therefore a big chunk of the time was spent researching, as can be seen in the time plan above. Users were also involved in different ways during the latter stages when prototyping and testing ideas.

Research

Research Questions - The research was initiated by defining research questions. This was done in a workshop with all team members. Defining questions was done to help us align our research goals and create guidance for the research activities.

The questions were grouped using the affinity diagram method. For example, one group contained questions regarding emotional attachment, where one of the questions was "How is an emotional attachment to products created?".

Design Probes - We built and sent out design probes to potential users. The probes contained small tasks that the user would do in relation to their storage. For example, in one task the user was asked to find and describe three things in their storage that they had not used in at least one year. By doing the probe tasks, the users got time to reflect on their storage and old products and could share their thoughts with us by writing them down. The probes confirmed a few of our suspicions regarding storage usage, but also provided new insights about what people keep there and why.

Autoethnography - As an exercise for building empathy for the problem, the team did an autoethnography study where we cleaned out our own storage. By reflecting on the process, we could more easily put ourselves in the shoes of our users and articulate the different emotional, intellectual, and physical struggles that one may go through while cleaning out old stuff.

Contextual Interviews - Data were also gathered through contextual interviews with users. We spoke with people in their own homes where they could show us their storages and what it contained. We also went to second-hand stores to speak with those who donated products about their thought process. We learned a lot about the users from these interviews. For example, we understood that getting rid of products that you have not used can make you feel wasteful, which might lead to you keeping them in storage instead.

Insight Development - With the data gathered we could formulate insights. We used various visualization techniques to assist us in this process, such as a persona and a product journey. Finally, 178 insights were formulated, grouped in an affinity diagram, and listed in a spreadsheet with pointers to what data the insight was derived from.

Defining Design Questions - As the final activity of the research process, a workshop was held in which we translated the insights into design questions that could be our starting point in the ideation and prototyping phase. The four design questions displayed below were formulated and selected during this workshop.

How can we make people have the safe feeling of a full storage without them owning their products?
How can we make the process of cleaning out old stuff from a storage easier?
How can we motivate people to clean out stuff from their storages?
How can we trigger people to clean out stuff from their storages?

Concept Development

Concept Development Process - With design questions in place, we could move on to the next phase. The aim here was to explore solutions and arrive at a single concept to present.

Ideation - In the ideation workshop, we used various techniques to come up with solutions that answered to our design questions. The ideas were clustered into categories, and each team member then got to pick three ideas he/she liked to write a more extensive description of (meaning that in total 18 ideas were described). For example, I wrote about one idea called "the yearly neighborhood storage clean out", where a company hosts a cleaning event in neighborhood yearly to encourage donations.

As a way of facilitation discussion about which ideas we liked the most and wanted to explore further, the 18 concepts were compared in relation to how easy they would be to implement and their potential impact. The discussion made it possible for us to identify 3 concepts that we wanted to continue with.

Design Sprints - Weekly design sprints were used as a way for us to structure the exploratory work with the concepts. During a sprint, we worked in pairs on one concept each with the goal of gaining knowledge into its potential and presenting the findings to the rest of the group at the end of the week.

Prototyping and mapping - We used a range of different methods during the sprints to explore the concepts. For example, one concept was explored by including users in a pilot donation project, where another concept was explored by mapping out actors and flows.

Selection - When a few of the concepts had been explored in the sprints, it was time to select a final one. For this, we used a method called service design scorecards, in which the concepts were ranked according to various parameters

Results

The concept: Rosa Lådan

The concept we selected is called Rosa Lådan. The concept is an extension of the current recycling service in Sweden. In the service, a box is placed in living areas where people can put their unused products. Each month a donation event is held in which a specific product category is requested (such as shoes, cellphones, cutlery, etc.). At a given date and time, a truck empties the box of donated products which will then be given to a company or organization that can take care of them in a valuable way.

System Perspective - The way the concept fits into the larger societal system was is of high relevance since the purpose was to promote a circular economy by increasing product longevity. The monthly event should be done with various collaborators who have an articulated plan for how they will re-use the products in a valuable way. Collaboration with municipalities would also be important to increase the amount of integration that can be done with existing societal systems.

Mobile Application

Connected to the service would also be a mobile application. The application increases the amount of interaction between the user and the service. The application lets the user turn on notifications for donation events, provides statistics for how many products have been donated in total, and lets the user track their own donation habits if they are interested in seeing their individual contribution.

Insights Connection - It was important to us that the concept could be motivated by the insights that we got during our research. This concept was picked because these connections were clear. Below, a few examples of the insights that were used to motivate the concept is displayed.

There is a lack of awareness surrounding the issue of storage cluttering.

By placing visible donation containers in living areas with information about why you should donate your old products, awareness of the issue is raised.

People lacks the knowledge of how one can go about decluttering ones storage. People does not know where to start.

As Rosa Lådan only requests one product type at a time, the user only needs to know whether he or she has an unused product of that type to donate. This decreases the amount of knowledge required to clean out storages.

Decluttering one's storage is usually a result of some form of trigger (such as moving to a new home).

The monthly donation events, announced through a notification system, regularly provides the user with the triggers required to clean out old products.

Lessons Learnt

As this project focused on applying knowledge gained throughout my education, the lesson learned was mostly about how to practically apply existing knowledge and to build further understanding through this. My role as a project leader made me practice how to facilitate meetings and workshops as well as how to administer schedules, tasks, and documentation to make sure that all team members were working together towards a common goal. For example, I learned how much planning is required in order to make a meeting valuable to its participants, as well as how a responsible task manager can really help a team in aligning their work.

Besides practicing being a project leader, the project made me improve in the following areas:

1. Service design - The project added to my mental toolbox of how a service design project can be structured and what activities is can contain in order to reach satisfying results.

2. User Research - As a lot of the work done during the project-centered around researching users, a better understanding of this area was built. This includes both how one can practically go about researching users (what methods and tools to use), and how the data gathered through these methods can be utilized to create a relevant solution to the identified problem.