Student Service Design Challenge 2022 - disrupting the ownership economy

The 2022 edition of the Student Service Design Challenge is underway. After a rigorous selection process, 28 teams received outstanding scores to continue in the competition. They represent schools and universities from all corners of the world, including India, Hong Kong, Chile, Canada, the USA, and leading design schools in Europe. The Challenge is a global design award that celebrates, encourages and inspires the next generation of designers.*)

This year's edition is all about disrupting the current ownership economy. Student teams are challenged to design a service concept that shifts the current take, make and waste system by empowering people and building community resilience. Designing for access instead of ownership enables the creation of products and services that do less harm to our planet.

Over 90 teams worldwide registered for this year’s Student Service Design Challenge. An assessment team of experts carefully reviewed all the submitted problem statements, taking into consideration criteria such as people-centricity, circularity, empowerment, and urgency among others. In the end, 28 teams qualified as finalists of this Challenge and will now work on developing full-fledged service solutions using a structured double diamond approach.

The teams not only represent students from all over the world but also from both undergraduate and graduate degree tracks in fields such as service design, collaborative design, product design, sustainable design, user experience design, fashion design, design management, design for social innovation, etc. and from non-design studies like psychology, business, computer science, digital media and others. All in all, the Challenge guarantees a myriad of perspectives from different cultures, ages, and professional fields that are crucial in finding viable solutions that are comprehensive and inclusive.

Identifying problems in a local context

To meet the students' backgrounds and contexts, one essential requirement of all the presented projects is that they are based on a locally found pressing problem. All teams must identify issues in their communities that lack a proper approach and solution or are based on systems that are simply not sustainable anymore. Through first-hand observation, interviews, probes and mappings,?teams can detect the gaps to dive into.

This year, the teams’ problem statements include topics and issues around food, living, fashion, construction, waste, working, nature, tourism, wellbeing, agriculture, energy, obesity, loneliness and many more.

The future of design

The Student Service Design Challenge was initiated in 2019 by Philips Experience Design to engage young creative talents in envisioning service solutions for tomorrow. Sean Carney, Chief Design Officer at Philips, believes a new generation of designers can inspire and develop fresh perspectives and out-of-the-box ways of working towards more sustainable and inclusive services:

"The solutions to today's enormous challenges require a systemic approach. Design needs to be inclusive; it needs to leverage multiple stakeholder collaboration, and most of all, it must be meaningful and valuable for the entire chain – not just the end-user but for society as a whole. Moreover, services need to be context-adaptable and empower local people.

We want to invite young designers to become part of our mission and involve them in finding people-centred and future-oriented services that are affordable and accessible to everyone. We are proud to work with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, IBM, Service Design College, and IKEA, to make that happen, and we invite others to join us in this rewarding and promising initiative."

An invaluable learning experience

The Challenge is much more than a competition. It is a unique learning opportunity for students to get to know and practice human-centric design methodologies by addressing urgent topics and designing complete service solutions.?

They are guided throughout the process by a bespoke challenge coach and individualised team coaches who meet with the teams numerous times during each round to assess and advise them. Students also participate in weekly classes covering topics related to the design process and the brief. Lecturers include renowned design experts and professors from leading universities; innovators and activists, design thinkers and doers.

Round 2 - Discover and Empathise

Within a week, all 28 teams will submit their work for Round 2 of the Challenge. The goal of this round is for teams to dive into their problem statements by looking deeply into the lives of all stakeholders involved. This phase centres on research and at looking far and wide at the entire ecosystem to gain the necessary insights to reframe, ideate and design in later rounds. These include journey maps, experience flows, ecosystem mappings, cultural probes, shadowing, and other research tools that are provided to them in the Challenge toolkit. All to better understand people’s behaviours and motivations and how these may be influenced by environmental, social, economic, organisational and regulatory factors.?

We are looking forward to their end results, but especially, we are eager to see how the students learn and grow during these 5 months. And how working on a real case in a collaborative setting opens their minds and hopes for making the world better through design.

We invite you to follow the teams' progress on the?Challenge LinkedIn page!

*) About the Student Service Design Challenge

The Student Service Design Challenge is a design challenge that celebrates, encourages and inspires the next generation of designers. It is a chance for design students to practice a design process based on a real-life case, use their joint creativity, and get rewarded for it.?

The Challenge is initiated by Philips, co-organised with Service Design College, in collaboration with IBM, IKEA, and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. It is open to students worldwide and aims to involve the next generation of designers to use their creative power to shape behaviour and promote a more globally conscious set of values. By promoting an inclusive approach to service design, the Challenge encourages students to develop exciting new service experiences that contribute value to people, the planet, and the public.?

The Challenge has 4 working rounds: Identify & explore, Empathise & discover, Frame & define, and Ideate & develop. At the end of this process, all teams submit their final service solutions to be evaluated by the jury in Round 5. The jury comprises renowned design experts from various fields related to human-centred (service) design, circular design, and design-led innovation. This year, the members of the jury are:?

John Thackara (Adjunct Professor, Tongji University, Senior Fellow, Royal College of Art and curator of the Social Food Forum), Daniel Haltia (Circular Business Designer, Ingka Group), Anna Valtonen (Professor of Strategic Design, Aalto University), Simona Rocchi (Senior Director of Design-for-Sustainability & Innovation, Philips Experience Design), Billy Seabrook (Vice President and the Global Chief Design Officer, IBM iX), and Alice Bodreau (Global Partners Manager, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation).

In June, the jury will carefully review, discuss and validate each submission based on the challenge criteria and select and announce the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners. So, the teams still have a few months to come up with the best service concept for the problem they have chosen to tackle.

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