Design Sprint: ResQ Club
Innovating solutions to reducing food waste
In the Service Design study unit at Laurea University of Applied Sciences in spring 2024, the Foodwaste Ecosystem project commissioned students to come up with new ideas for reducing food waste. Me and six other students set out to develop a new concept for ResQ Club that could reduce food waste and use that to help people who need it.
The development took place during the Design Sprint week at Laurea University of Applied Sciences, and our service design technique was Double Diamond. The five-day sprint week was divided so that the first four days focused on four different areas of the double diamond, i.e. Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver in that order. On the fifth day, we presented our prototype to the client.
Discover
We mapped the current situation by interviewing café workers via email, benchmarking similar existing services, conducting a PEST analysis, and defining and categorizing different stakeholders. We also defined business goals that could guide us during the ideation phase.
Define
Based on the information we collected, we set out to put together a research wall of all the considerations that had come up in the survey and that should be taken into account, such as ensuring the cold chain, high prices, and sparsely populated areas. At this point, we also created a user persona named Anna-Kaisa Lahtinen, more familiarly known as A-K.
We also considered current consumer trends, such as the popularity of food waste and the consumer's financial situation, which could influence the ideation phase. Finally, based on all this, we began to look at the situation from different perspectives, and created a collection of problems and questions, from which we would choose a few and start concretely solving them. Our questions are particularly related to delivering food waste to the poor and preventing food waste from being thrown away.
Develop
After choosing the questions, we started putting together an idea wall, where we put all the suggestions that came to mind at a low threshold. We put together two different idea cards from the suggestions, one of which we started to develop even further.
The idea we chose is based on volunteers from various associations and their use in delivering ResQ meals. We explained what benefits this idea could bring to ResQ and illustrated it with a user journey.
I also drew a demonstrative comic about our idea.
Deliver
We created a visual business plan for ResQ, a Business Model Canvas, which summarizes all the essential aspects of the business idea. Finally, we created a Pitch presentation video using Animaker to present the business idea. The client liked the presentation and said that the idea had potential.