III. Our Journey

Our design journey can be summarised as being strategically experimental, fully collaborative, and enthusiastically ambitious. Through the online co-design workshops and rigorous prototype testing, combined with digital marketing methodologies, we could ensure the whole service proposition be built with the set of well-validated service building blocks.

Internal workshop

As a kick-off of the project, we first held an internal sprint session to have an overview of the process. This led us to start a short survey to narrow down the focus.

Initial survey

We started our project with a simple survey to Aalto students to understand student wellbeing and narrow down our focus. This led us to focus more on the daily routine of the students.

Interviews

Throughout the project, we consistently conducted interviews with students from different majors, teachers, and various student associations, as well as professionals who work on wellbeing services around the campus. It helped understand students themselves, their campus lives, student wellbeing from different perspectives. We got a number of service ideas through the interviews. We also get numerous feedback on our ideas and assumptions.

Workshops

We created social media accounts in Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, as our channel not only to get attention but also to communicate and collect the information from the students — the Instagram account has more than 150 followers so far. workshop participants would like to recommend our co-design workshop to a friend or classmates

Social media

We organised two online co-creation workshops to co-learn student lifestyle and their wellbeing more in depth, to crowdsource ideas of service interventions, and to validate and upgrade the service ideas together.

Validation

We created prototypes to test out the hypotheses. We validated different levels of hypothesis in different fidelity level, learned from the feedback, reflected back to the hypothesis and prototype, and tested again.

Co-creation

Our process was based on the concept of co-design, but we did not simply make a proposal and be done with it. We co-designed a platform service that could also be co-implemented and co-operated.