(Archive) Student Service Design Challenge 2022 - Winners Exhibition

How to design for more access and less ownership

If the COVID pandemic has taught us anything, surely it’s that predicting the future is futile. The pandemic has had (and still has) an adverse effect on companies, families and individuals, society as a whole, and also on the planet. Like all crises, this one has accelerated the demise of some industries but speeded up the advent of nascent industries.

What has become clearer is that we, humans and all living creatures, depend on each other. We are part of larger ecosystems, and within these systems, we need to interconnect and interact in order to survive, feel safe, belong, be valued, enjoy life and prosper.

When connecting people in different roles, such as owners, sharers and users, value can be created by enabling interactions and transactions amongst them. Today, a growing group of consumers are redefining their values and priorities. We can call this ‘new consumerism’ or ‘conscious consumerism’, uniting several key consumer trends that share many of the same drivers, some with high and others with more gentle transformative effects.

Redefining the concept of ownership

Younger generations worldwide, especially millennials and younger ones, have a different mentality regarding ownership. Not only because they have less purchasing power, but because they value having fewer possessions.

This third edition of the Student Service Design Challenge focused on designing services to disrupt the current ownership economy. Student teams were challenged to design a service concept that could shift the current take, make and waste system by empowering people and building community resilience.

Meet the winning teams and their service concepts

Service design is a people-centred approach to making sense of the current status quo, and coming up with solutions to improve it. There is significant potential for adding value by involving end-users in the closed-loop process. Engaging, rewarding, and experience-rich services are needed to improve product lifetime, preserving their value as high as possible for as long as possible.

From an initial 90 teams, 28 qualified as finalists and worked on developing full-fledged service solutions using a structured approach. The teams represented 25 universities and schools around the world, reflecting the next generation of designers’ widespread and incontestable commitment to using their creativity and skills to create more people-centric and planet-positive services.

This year’s submitted solutions dealt with a variety of issues: elder care, mobility, living habits, renewable energy, fashion, e-waste, food, childcare, fishing, funerary services and more. At the exhibition you will get to know the concepts, explained, visualised and prototyped, and the student teams who designed them.

You'll find the exhibition at the Philips Museum. Registration in advance is not necessary.