Busy Bees
Made in collaboration with: Emma Park, James Curran, Pinar Dumlu, Katie Wilkinson and Hannah Cook
The project:
As part of my Service Design for Social Innovation module, at Loughborough University my team and I were set a brief by the Ford Fund to address Sustainable Urban Solutions for Future Cities. The Ford Fund Smart Mobility Challenge is a grant-making initiative designed to empower students at higher education organisations to bring about change through innovative, creative projects that aim to make people’s lives better and help address social challenges, in this case, by shaping the way people live and move with their urban communities.
The challenge AND GOAL:
Sedentary office workers who want to become more active and break up a work day but lose track of time while working and have a lack of incentives to get up from their desk. In the long run immobility can be detrimental to physical and mental wellbeing.
Goals:
Through our service we want to
Incentivise employees through friendly competition
Improve health and wellbeing of sedentary workers
Help them get up, get active, stay mobile for longer
Process:
User study:
For the user study we engaged with community group members, organisations and local councils to get insights on what could be possible to do on a community level.
We held interviews with office workers and made observations of their daily activities. For this we gave the participants a fit bit to wear over a couple of days and report back to us. We also executed a diary study to extract insights about our target group.
A part from this a literature research study was made on long term health issues that may occur due to a sedentary lifestyle.
We created a user Journey to explain how an office worker’s emotional state could vary over the course of a workday and also stated our key insights which were divided into:
Office culture. Eg. guilt about taking breaks.
Effects of the job. Eg. no energy after work.
Pain points. Eg. stuck in a rut
Ideation:
We held a co-creation session. We had prepared props and material to aid the co-creation session and support idea making.
We used video prototyping as a part of the ideation but also to further refine and explain our concept. This resulted in a clearly defined user, a presentation of their needs and how our service will aid them in create movement in their work life.
Deliver:
Concept:
The concept consists of both an application to track progress and also physical artefacts to initiate activity.
Business proposition:
We created a business proposition consisting of a service blueprint, stakeholder map, value proposition and business model canvas
Video Prototype
Enjoy this short video that explains the service and its benefits.
Retrospect and learnings
New team and new country
It was a challenge to be new in a team who already knew each other from before and also be in a new country. By communicating and showing that I was ready to work hard and also socialise with my team outside work time, I believe that I gained their confidence in both me and my skills. I also quickly adopted their preferred tools of working, planning and communication which was a fun experience as I got to learn new tools.
Time management
We had a hard time to pick an area we wanted to focus on and explored several fields, hence we got a bit of a slow start which in the end caused some late nights of work. Had I redone this project I would have wanted to update the time plan once we had decided on our target area.
The result
I’m very proud of this project and it was very well received from our course leaders who encouraged us to seek funding. When I had travelled back to Sweden, my team got the chance to present our concept for the Leicester Council. I see this as an acknowledgement that what we did can make a difference. I’m convinced that two critical factors for our success were our good teamwork, together with a solid user-centred focus and our ability to work with resources at hand.