Context
In the scope of climate migration, cities like Copenhagen, due to their welfare programs and high quality of life, is and will continue to be a popular destination for voluntary migration. How will an increase in migration at a large scale, both internally and across borders, affect the city? What future services can we imagine to help migrants better integrate and flourish in a new city? We explored some complex systems that would help communities in Copenhagen transition to futures where there is better support for climate migrants.
Research
Our team focused the research on temporarily displaced people and voluntary migrants coming to settle in Denmark. We interviewed expats, students and climate disaster victims to understand their challenges in arriving to Copenhagen, understanding the foreign systems, integrating with Danish society and their approach to solving crisis situations.
One of the insights we gathered from the interviews was that there is already vast information and resources available for newcomers to access, both online and offline. However the place and the moment this information is made available to them is not optimised to their needs, thus voiding its purpose and meaning.
Process
Using our HMW, we conducted an ideation workshop to get a variety of ideas from a diverse group of designers.
Concept
For this service design project, we landed on the concept of TIPS: Tailored Information Provider Service. TIPS organises free city tours for newcomers to help them better absorb the vast multitude of Danish processes and information in an engaging and interactive way. By taking people to locations like the International House, bank, library, etc, TIPS provides them with the know-how of the most essential processes on location, thereby unburdening people from information overload.
Experience Prototype
We designed the entire tour along with the artefacts for the different touch points along the journey.
We created TIPS tour flyers, a TIPS website and shared these across social media platforms and various information booths across Copenhagen.
While people were able to sign-up for the tour through the website, we also provided them with support through chat and email service.
For the tour, we used a TIPS signboard, stickers, language cards and information booklets. At the end of the tour, we followed up with emails and a summary of the tour.
Moving forward, we see opportunities to provide more specific paid tours and also leverage the network of people that join the tours to provide further services.
Learnings
- People who signed up for our service were the ones who had just arrived to Copenhagen. This gave us more clarity on our user base.
- As all our participants came to know of the service through social media, we realised that online posts are more effective in reaching our target audience than distributing physical flyers in the city.
- Through comments on our online posts, we were also able to gauge how people felt about our service in general.
- Having an expat as a guide, who had gone through the same experiences as the new comers, and allowing participants to add to the guide’s knowledge, created a friendly and informal atmosphere where people felt free to share and learn from each other.
The Future
How TIPS would look like 15 years into the future? Read the article here.
This project was done as part of a two-week Service Design course at CIID, along with my teammates Micol Galeotti, Yuxi Liu, Axel Jorgensen and Ubaldo Andrea Desiato.
