Vera Frasson, MA Service Design 2023, MA Design Price'23: Step up to diversity!
A toolbox for a more inclusive cultural landscape
Diversity matters more than ever. Significant steps toward a more inclusive and fair future are required.
Diversity has a measurable positive impact on performance and well-being in the workplace. Cultural institutions lack strategies and comprehensive implementation despite an openness to embracing it.
The toolbox of information and workshop activities can help institutions to foster self-reflection and overcome the systematic discrimination of minority groups. The targeted stakeholders are core teams and organizers of cultural institutions who have the power and initiative to change from within.
Gloria Ntawuruhunga, MA Service Design 2023: Lausanne Lab
AI is used as a participatory tool to accelerate car-free futures for Lausanne residents.
Lausanne is considering removing cars from its urban area to reduce their carbon emissions. The accelerating climate crises demands that organizations and individuals co-design sustainable futures together. The “Lausanne Lab” is a workshop format that enables individuals and organizations to engage, explore and co-ideate potential car-free futures for their city. AI helps visualize strategies with boundary objects that serve as starting points for debate. In this participatory process, generative AI creates visualizations of speculative design scenarios. Workshop participants use the AI model to generate images based on a prompt. Designers serve as curators to help non-designers achieve their vision. Using AI as a creative director helps non-designers produce engaging and understandable visions faster. Using AI and boundary objects is cost-effective and easy to set up, making it an innovative and manageable approach for the local government.
Tamara Trabucco, MA Service Design 2023: Campus Collab
Bringing the university together, one project at a time.
Campus Collab offers a unique forum for students to develop skills, find projects and collaborators, and actively shape their learning experience.
The collaboration tool turns ideas into reality and fosters a supportive student community at HSLU.
The platform allows students to post their ideas, vote on projects and budgets, and cooperate in their realization. Campus Collab supports the needs and relations of university students. This innovative platform stimulates proactive students to team up with like-minded individuals.
Camila Gutiérrez Meade, MA Service Design, expected 2024: Mind your Tits
Breast Cancer awareness in young women
Breast cancer awareness is crucial, and a lack of knowledge and resources means that young women are often unaware of the risks they face. This thesis is motivated by personal experience and a deep understanding of the impact of the disease. It focuses on the importance of raising awareness and seeks to develop solutions to educate young women to prevent breast cancer.
Sabine Leuthold, MA Service Design, expected 2024: 360° Service Framework
A product is also a service. Ways to more sustainability - Mediation methods for SMEs
This thesis aims to support Swiss SMEs in effectively integrating sustainability into their business activities beyond common but limited measures to reduce their carbon footprint. Using a service design approach, the focus is placed on the environmental handprint of a company. The thesis successfully develops tools that allow a company to self-analyse its own environmental targets and track its progress.
Martin Dusek, MA Service Design 2022: Wunsch-O-Mat & other conversation tools
Interventions for inclusive city planning
A failed conversation between urban planners, landowners, and residents can lead to protests and write-offs in the millions. While participatory budgets (PB) involve the population in urban development, often they only reach an established middle class, thus reinforcing the prevailing power structures and excluding low-income groups and migrants. Taking LuzernNord as an example, this project proposes modifications to current approachess to Participatory Budgets. A set of conversation tools –including the Wunsch-O-Mat, a mix-and-match book – help planners engage with minorities they usually overlook. The tools enable local residents to formulate their needs in an accessible manner. The collected insights are translated into concrete measures with the help of planning experts. The unheard voices of residents are thereby included in the planning discussion about a city's future.
Marta Angelillis, MA Service Design 2022: A case for teamwork
Tackling waste management issues through community engagement
Addressing waste is not just an environmental issue; it concerns people’s needs, behaviors, and relationships. This project aims at leveraging the social aspects of human behavior to address complex waste management issues in an exemplary community in rural Italy.
Torremaggiore is a quiet agricultural town in southern Italy where about 60% of waste is recycled. Yet, waste is often left abandoned in and out of town, while part of the population is not engaged in recycling efforts. In fact, sustainable waste management practices are not yet acknowledged as legitimate and this generates tension.
Through a community engagement action, all community members - citizens, municipal representatives, waste management staff, environmental associations - come together to learn about waste management, share tips, questions, and engage in conversations with each other. The initiative sees each stakeholder play a different role while various social needs are uncovered and addressed.
This approach simultaneously promotes good practices and builds bridges among stakeholders, working as a model for enhancing public participation in similar communities as well as in other realms of the public sector.
Tim Heeb, MA Service Design 2022: Farewell Smartphone
Extend the service life of smartphones
Before upgrading your next smartphone, try to keep it for another year. This choice will save you money and help save the planet. Building a smartphone, specifically mining rare materials, represents approx. 80 % of the device’s total CO2 emissions.
“Farewell Smartphone” intervenes in all phases of the smartphone life cycle:
The first intervention in marketing & distribution helps you in the purchasing decision with an ecolabel. This label provides information about the carbon emission of the production and device durability considering repair, spare parts and battery life.
The second intervention in service life has the purpose to use your smartphone for longer by by creating a more meaningful bond. The engagement OS gives the user information about the use and makes regular sanity checks.
The third intervention is looking at the hibernation & reuse phase, where 60% of the unused smartphones end up in drawers. A new system allows the user to simply pass on the old device for further use, when swapping the smartphone. There the user benefits financially.
Farewell – a good and long life for smartphones.
Alexandra Gurtner, MA Service Design 2021: (in)visible mind
Mental health at the University Development of a holistic mental health strategy model and working tools
Mental illness is one of the most significant challenges of today's society - and students are also increasingly affected by it. Numerous factors, some of them individual, play a role - how students can be reached, supported and preventively trained in the best possible way.
"(in)visible mind" presents a strategy model and working tool for colleges and universities on how mental health can be addressed holistically and effectively. Ultimately, it's also about making the issue visible - because mental health affects us all.
Eva Vuckovic, MA Service Design 2021: Red Thread Project
A social entrepreneurship model to safeguard traditional textile handicrafts and empower the local artisan community
The project models an ethical production process that nurtures and maintains fading traditional handicrafts such as embroidery, weaving, lacemaking from the Podravina area, Croatia.
It empowers and encourages slow, manual work over the fast, mechanical while proposing handicraft as a strategy to achieve re-value in fashion objects and strengthening the product user-relationship. My role as a designer is to act as a facilitator in modeling sustainable enterprises in rural artisan communities while respecting the region's natural and cultural resources. The project's enterprise vision aims to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity, old and new, youth and seniority resulting in unique, handcrafted fashion objects conveying the story of rooted time, place, community, culture, and identity.
Aurelio Todisco, MA Service Design 2020: Lucerne for All
Paths of Inclusion
"Lucerne for All" is a design project that aims to improve the living conditions, social participation in urban life and access to solidarity structures of marginalized groups of people, especially refugees, including Sans-Papiers. In addition, the project promotes the activation and networking of the urban population, the organizations providing assistance, the solidarity structures and the municipal authorities. "Luzern für Alle" consists of a mobile application and offers recurring public events and participation opportunities. The analysis and research and the implementation of the project were carried out using design research methods. They focused on the participation of the target group and the project partners. The project partner is the alliance Solinetz Luzern.
