In Umeå, there are about 37,000 students in the university.  Students would like to purchase furnitures to make their rooms like home with good price, and have to figure out what to do with those items when they leave the city. Second-hand shopping and donations of are very common in Swedish culture. This sustainable lifestyle has influenced many current services, such as IKEA's "Cirkulärbutiken", and many local second-hand shops. We wanted to explore in more depth the social, cultural and emotional interactions that underlie these behaviours. Students are the most frequently users of this potential service, so we tried to focus on this group as the starting point to design our toolkit.  

Designing a toolkit gives me an opportunity to consider interaction design from a more human related perspective: how to shape the relationships among humans, materials and activities and how to bring cognitive, emotional and physical aspects into a successful whole. The multiple layers from the context also push me to switch back and forth among design a toolkit for other designers, design the materials for the participants in the workshop and design the interactions in the workshop to achieve the goals.

In this project the challenge we faced with is that, we couldn't only design a method without a solid ground to apply. We have to design the method and the service parallelly, sometimes it's difficult to switch thinking between them.

We basiclly solved this problem by doing. We tried to iterate our design by trying out methods. Rehearsal for staging the service made us have a clear view of our service statement.

We firstly tried out this method to gain stories from the respondents life experience. Compared with conventional interview, active interview doesn't treat people as a vessel of the answers for the designers to extract what they want, but try to discover which part of the life experience could be supported by the service. We did one interview within our group and iterated it before we actually interview a international student.

The toolkit aims to help others facilitate a workshop to discover potential opportunities in an exsiting service and ideate future scenarios as the material to develop further design.