PERSONAS FOR THE SHARING ECONOMY
In my free time, I have been volunteering for the start-up Green Tech Challenge for a couple of months now. So far, it's been great learnings in entrepreneurship / business and lots of fun to work closely with other Service Designers [Andreas Jonsson and Gonçalo Nunes]. Today I would like to high-light one particular experience: During the week of the challenge in November, I had the chance to prepare and facilitate a workshop for 3 promising start-ups within the sharing economy : Spaceflex, YoooWe and Closay. Although their focus are diverse [spaces, gears, dresses], they are all aiming at reducing the pollution related to the production of new items by making the existing ones, that we don't use on a daily basis, accessible to the many. My role during this 2h workshop was to make these young entrepreneurs gain a better understanding of their users. I did that by teaching them how to use a powerful service design tool called Personas. Structure of the workshop:
10 min presentation about Service Design, Personas, why and how to use it.
1h30 to help the participants to create 1 persona each. Use of white boards. Balancing silent brainstorm and cross-group discussions.
10 min for the participants to digitalize their personas in a prepared template in google drive [share with colleagues].
10 min for conclusion and reflections.
A big thank you to the three crazy minds [Frederik van Deurs, Martin A. Petersen, Joachim Almdal] who funded Green Tech Challenge and gave me this opportunity!