Service Design

Design for mothers of Hsinchu Science Park
Hsinchu, Taiwan
Team work
Prof. Furen Lin

Using Hsinchu, the city where our school is located, as a base for exploration, we found that the issue of childcare seems an urgent and important issue for those who are currently starting a family in Hsinchu or have plans to do so in the future.

The whole design process went through six steps: empathy, definition, ideation, prototype, test, and modification. We discovered that the mothers in Hsinchu Science Park have deeper needs underneath the parenting issues: lower self-worth, stereotypes of "motherhood", not enough respect and time for themselves.

We developed a service system to help moms - the mom-friendly MaMa cafe. At MaMa cafe, stay-at-home moms are able to rediscover their values, and working moms have a secure place for childcare.

During the empathy and definition stage, we conducted in-depth interviews with Hsinchu Science Park mothers to understand stay-at-home and working mothers' current situation while using affinity diagrams to organize the core issues and create personas.

We learned from personas that stay-at-home mothers have the following needs:

To have the role of mothers valued

To help mothers reduce the difficulties and discomfort of returning to the workplace 

Working mothers have the following needs:

Trustworthy and reassuring childcare services 

Allowing mothers to have their own time to do what they want to do

After brainstorming and evaluating the feasibility and creativity of ideas, we decided to create a mom-friendly CAFE to provide a safe environment for mothers.

Through the convergence of ideas, we present the concept by Lego.

In order to verify whether this prototype has solved the pain points of moms, we went to Hsinchu Guanxin Park to conduct random interviews. After the interviews, we received the following feedback and re-iterated our ideas in response to the feedback:

With the modifications, our overall service prototype is as follows.

Before undertaking this project, I did not understand what having a child meant to a woman, but after delving deeper, I realised that even though women are equal to men in every way, their lives change dramatically after having a child. Understanding their needs, we conceived a space where mothers could support each other.

What touched me most in this project is that a good service design needs to echo the whole service system in all aspects, for example in this project, the space design should echo and complement the operational design of the space.