Service Design project at the Masters Programme in Interaction Design, Umeå Institute of Design,
10 weeks in 2010.

This was a school project we had together with Umeå municipality. We worked in small groups of two and had close collaboration with an own department of the municipality. I worked together with the classmate Jennifer Sarich- Harvey and we worked with the Streets and Park department.

We interviewed the staff at the Streets and Park department. Karin was th e Manager for Streets and Parks. We tried to understand the hierarchy at the municipality and how her role was in relation to the rest of the staff.

Torbjörn is the 1st Line Manager for Street department. Their work was based on a lot of paper work/ analog way to file different data. The staff spent four hours each day to read and answer complaints from the citizens. The citizens could contact the minicipality in six different ways; email, sms, phone calls, online chat at the municipality's website, face to face and letters. Call & Report is a software that the municipality used to call out contractors. The flip chart works as a news feedinformation between the teams who works in different chifts.

 

We observed the Zone Manager Erland during two hours when he and a one of the municipalitys contractor inspected some asphalt.

Four citizens which we interviewed. Each one of them had sent in an application to Streets and Parks.

An animation of the hierarchy at the municipality and Streets and Parks.

Role play and workshop with the rest of the class.

 

Blueprint of the complaints that the Street department receives. The content is draggable. Click and drag and the content will follow. It is also possible to right click and zoom in to make it bigger.

 

Brainstorm sesion.

 

Making the wireframes for the final concept.

 

 

We evaluated the concept with the 1st Line Manager for Street department, Torbjörn at the municipality. And we asked him about feedback to improove it before the final presentation. The concept is easy; the citizens contact the municipality in one of the six possile ways (phone, sms, chat, letter, e-mail or face to face). Then the municipality communicates with the contractors via an internal software.When the problem has been fixed, the contractor forwards a note back to the municipality who replies to the citizens in the same media via their software.