During my second year of graduate school, I was part of a course on Service Design where we used the lens of user-centered design to consider the broader contexts in which users encounter products. The class was asked to focus on sustainability for our project ideas and one of the ideas that came up was addressing textile waste. The United States generates 16 million tons of textile waste per year with only around 15% of that getting recycled [1]. Clothes are also being used for shorter periods of time and being prematurely disposed of [2]. Recycling only mitigates the issue, while not addressing the root of the problem: high rates of disposal, fast fashion, and consumer demand.
Mend.Able is a clothing mending service aimed at reducing textile waste. It encourages pro-environmental behavior change by providing people with the physical space, equipment skills and relationships necessary for cultivating a habit of clothing mending
my role
Worked with 3 other teammates and equally divided tasks around strategy, research as well as design.
Timeline
October 2021 - December 2021
tools
Figma, Miro
Since the team had limited context on textile waste, we started by reading on the current state of textile waste in the United States and the problems it has created. Through research, we found that clothing mending was becoming one viable solution to addressing textile waste [3, 4].
We also stumbled upon social practice theory in our readings. Social practice theory teaches that "pro-environmental behavior change requires the presence of assemblages of ‘things ’ such as equipment and infrastructures, of ‘competences ’ such as knowledge and skills, and of ‘meaning ’ such as emotional resonance and identity" [5]. For the purposes of this project, this meant that our approach needed to be guided by these requirements in order to surface the kind of behavioral change we were hoping to encourage in the people who would use our service.
Once we had context on the problem space, it was time to talk to people and really understand the pains, behaviors and attitudes people had towards textile waste and clothing mending as a potential solution. We surveyed 34 people and interviewed 4 participants. Our main goal was answering this question - "why might people mend their clothes and what barriers are preventing them from doing so today?"
Through talking to people, we did not only start to understand the motivations and barriers around mending, we began to craft the values and design principles that might inform our solution.
With our design principles of "connecting" and being "inclusive" in mind, we decided to begin our design process with a co-design session. We chose co-designing because it allowed us to come alongside potential users in experiencing what the concept could look like. It allowed us to see how people might expect a clothing mending service to work and also how potential users might interact with each other. With the values & barriers that we derived from our research - we were able to see how they might play out and think more about what really was important when it came to defining our principles.
We recruited participants to role play how they imagined a community-based mending service to work. We did a test-run with our classmates were we able to think about considerations to take into the session with participants. The co-design session also included a drawing activity for participants to physically represent what they imagined the space to look like.
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It was an enjoyable activity for the participants and we were really able to get a grasp on how we might go about designing the physical space. However, due to the remote nature of the activity, it was a little more difficult to envision how the dynamics of the role playing might impact our service which was going to be in-person.
At this point, we knew more about textile waste and how mending could be a solution to address it. We had also heard from potential users what would be expected of whatever our proposed solution shaped out to be. What we were hearing from all this research was that as good of a solution as mending was, it needed to happen in community.
Our response? A community-based mending space. As a way for us to begin envisioning what this might look like, we created an ecosystem map. The process of creating an ecosystem map allowed us to define what the key players in our service would be and helped us illustrate what the exchange of artifacts, information, and value among them might be.
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We also created a journey map to visualize an idealized experience and inform our service blueprint. Our service blueprint allowed us to see the solution from a bird's eye-view. How would the customer experiences in our journey map align with the backstage processes? What were the potential pitfalls or areas of opportunities in each stage?
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As we got closer and closer to finalizing what our service might look like, we decided to reenact the end-to-end experience of a first-time customer getting a mending service. Body-storming allowed us to reflect more closely on the mechanics of the service. In role playing a scenario, we were required to think about what was needed in the moment instead of only thinking with the best case scenarios in mind.
The exercise was able to reaffirm the value of having an open layout because of the many interactions between different players such as staff, menders and customers. It also raised more questions that the team needed to consider as we inched towards the final service.
In addition to our service blueprint, we designed artifacts that might provide a practical way for anyone reading about our project to understand how our values and principles would show up in our service.
From our co-design sessions, we learned what people wanted the space to look like and service among the key players. The floor plan shows how the space might be laid out. Each area is used for a different function, and the open layout provides an easygoing flow from room to room.
Mend.Able’s pricing philosophy resonates with the values: community, accessibility and transparency. The prices are different if customers choose a professional mender or a volunteer mender, and are suggested so that customers can pay according to their satisfaction.
You can read more about our project in this final deck and see more artifacts that were created in our process. As with any project, particularly school projects that are severely constrained by time, I learned a lot.
One significant lesson I learned that I try to carry into my work as a product designer now is the practice of going back to the big picture often. As we made decisions for our service, I realize that we may have focused too much on the customer perspective. For example, we never fully thought about what some of our values and design principles might mean for a staff member. I wonder how doing this work earlier might have changed the decisions we ended up making.
As we wrapped up our project, our team decided to revisit our deliverables and the feedback we received at the time. Our iteration relied heavily on the feedback we received in class and even from our participants. However, some of our artifacts were not updated immediately. Iterating on half-updated feedback impacted how our scope changed (or didn’t change).
Overall, this class helped me exercise my design thinking and strategy skills - things I use every moment at work now.
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