Masters students receiving honourable mention in Student Service Design Challenge 2022 IKEA Service Design Spin-off Challenge in the Barcelona Design Week

Congratulations to Team Kooly on receiving an honourable mention in the Student Service Design Challenge (SSDC) 2022 IKEA Service Design Spin-off Challenge in the Barcelona Design Week. Their project, Furn.up, scored high on the criterion ‘society oriented’ for their inclusive and sustainable service concept, will also be shown in the Dutch Design Week this October.

Team Kooly is a multicultural and highly interdisciplinary design team consisting of six master’s students in the Master of Design (MDes) and MSc Multimedia and Entertainment Technology (MSc MET) programmes: Christy Au-Yeung and Zhengtao Ma (MSc MET) and Hyunjin Kang, Justus Bremer, Mengyan Liu, and Xinrui Wang (MDes).

The team was formed out of their passion for sustainability and innovative service solutions, and all shared a vision to change the way people live through design. Through their knowledge in the fields of interaction, business and multimedia design, they explored the way of life in Hong Kong not only from an environmental perspective but also from a social perspective, rescuing the power of design in a comprehensive and highly specialised process.

Team Kooly: “We formed our team based on the premise of trying to involve students from a variety of different backgrounds. Overall, the main goal for us was to be able to learn from one another and get an understanding of all the different skills designers from different disciplines might have since we all have slightly different work and education backgrounds.”

“Multinationality was an important factor for us. Our team includes students from four different regions of the world, one from Hong Kong, three from Mainland China, one from South Korea, and one from Germany. This way, we could also get a lot of different cultural viewpoints into this project, which was an important factor that ensured the success of our project.”

The SSDC is initiated by Philips Experience Design and co-organised with service design college in collaboration with IBM, IKEA, and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.