Ingrid Øygard, Jeeviga Gunathasan og Tobias Wulvik

4. klasse // Design 7 - Tjenestedesign - TPD4156

Assignment from the TPD 4156 - Design 7 - Service Design course completed during the fall semester of 2019. The project began with a statement showing the magnitude of lonely students at Norwegian universities. The SHoT survey stated that nearly 1⁄3 of all Norwegian students often or very often experience loneliness. This statement created an itch for us to learn more about the topic and map out the challenges, so that we could create a service that helps students when they are feeling lonely. Multiple interviews later with students, organizations, social workers and other stakeholders, we phrased the design challenge. The new strategy was to find ways to prevent loneliness. Eventually, we looked at services focusing on building friendships and creating better student environments at the university. The intention behind the service would be to especially help lonely students, but still, target all students in Trondheim. Research shows personalistic self-disclosure and close friends are two significant tools preventing loneliness. Utilizing this, we developed a concept based on questions designed to create close relationships. Two prototypes and user tests later, we had a concept with good feedback, but the questions lacked a suitable environmental context for use. This lead to a new collaboration. The Department of Computer Science (IDI) launched in 2018 a project called Lunch Buddy where two students who do not know each other meet and have lunch together. A co-creation session with IDI representatives inspired collaboration to merge our solutions with their service as well as improving and developing their concept further. The main pain points of the Lunch Buddy service that IDI identified were recruitment, manual matchmaking, evaluation and handing out an envelope in person. Further, we ask ourselves the question, how can the concept be scaled to other situations and reduce loneliness at a bigger scale? https://tobwul.github.io/Samle/