KERB Lift
Type of work: Service design/Co-created
Date: February 2019 - April 2019 (2 1/2 months)
Team: 5 // Mengcheng Yu, Francesco Cagnola, Hyojin Bae, Paulien van Rijckevorsel + me
Project partner: KERB
My strengths: Field research - Insight synthesis - Workshop planning and analysis
KERB is a street food market membership organisation, dedicated to the incubation of London’s most promising street food businesses. For this project we were asked to create a new service proposition that helps KERB strengthen their platform approach and optimise the value of food marketplaces as a public resource, by better meeting the needs of the public, the traders and policy makers. This brief caught my attention as it involves different things that interest me like food, cultural exchanges, business models and place making.
KERBLift
The Design
KERB Lift is a street food businesses accelerator that helps traders create a long term vision - through a step-by-step guidance process - by marrying the business’ needs to what the surrounding community has to offer.
It is a value exchange that creates opportunities and connects the community of traders with the community surrounding the marketplace, helping KERB strengthen their platform approach in the food industry and strengthen their relationship with new businesses even after living the programme.
To support the accelerator programme, we thought about using KERB’s main communication platform: The Vault. Adding features like business profiles, contacts to traders, community members, mentors and other collaborators, access to the business plan, goals, tracking process and relevant information about setting their new business.
Process
The research included contextual interviews in street food markets and co-creation workshops with KERB and the traders. Identifying pain points and problem framing were powerful components of the project; we used tools like user journeys, blueprints and roleplaying.
We worked on understanding multilayered organisations and connections between potential stakeholders, for example, we saw opportunities for a potential partnership between KERB and Urban Partners, a charity organisation, comprising a network of business, working with the local community to create a thriving urban environment in Kings Cross.
Lessons Learnt
Connecting stakeholders
Getting involved with stakeholders and connecting them through our project was an interesting lesson and a way to see how service design is useful in different contexts.
Prototyping the idea
Testing this idea was difficult because of the different actors involved in it to work and the time limits for the project. To implement a concept like this, it might be interesting to start with a few traders and community members as a pilot and then scale in different marketplaces.
Synthesising field research
It was challenging to synthesise the field research into a compelling narrative that brought together the voices of the key actors and then reflect this in a concept where the specific needs where met.