Little Hamlet

Service Design • Social Impact • Sustainability • Product Design

Project Overview

Becoming a parent is a challenging transition with significant identity shifts and challenges in someone's life. The new arrival disrupts basic daily routines, time and money, and affects mind and body most. Hormonal changes, new sleep patterns, and new emotions to challenge relationships are big factors in how new parents make decisions for their family. This challenges identity, causing individuals to redefine what it means to be a parent and reshaping social and relational dynamics. The project part of the student service design challenge, where we had to follow a brief we were allocated to IKEA. With the new baby come a mountain of items, as they grow so do the purchases - becoming unsustainable both for parents and the environment.

Goal

Our most important goal was to understand the roles of caregivers and how planning can create anxieties, that lead to emotionally driven purchases that may not benefit the family or the planet. As babies quickly outgrow items, the cycle of over-purchasing and discarding becomes stressful for families and harmful to the environment. How might we build a sustainable solution to mitigate the emotional purchasing? How might that solution be a service IKEA is interested in investing in?

Outcome

We created a service that was systemically informed, considered each dimension of our insights and the brief we had been given. We created a service that fosters organic community by creating homes away from home for mums. At Little Hamlets, mums know baby will be safe while they connect with themselves and one another, do the things they love, and share products, resources, and experiences.

Client

SSDC by SDC Campus, in partnership with IBM, IKEA, Philips, etc.

Team

Service Design / Behavioural Science / Brand Design / Marketing / Product

My Role

Service Designer, research, strategy / Brand Designer, and visual design

Year & Timeframe

6 months

We aimed to understand the challenges faced by new parents, such as postpartum depression, social isolation, and societal pressures. By researching the market landscape and mapping the socio-ecological factors influencing parents, we identified that these challenges often lead to emotionally charged buying behaviours. We found that strained mental health makes sustainable consumption difficult.

Immersing ourselves in the experiences of first-time parents, we identified patterns of decision overwhelm and purchasing drivers like excessive product choices, misleading information, and a lack of trusted sources.

Physical and emotional stressors further complicate sustainable purchasing. We synthesized these challenges and core needs to identify opportunities for fostering sustainable home lives. Key insights included the shifting identities of new parents and how these changes impact consumption.

New parenthood and the identities that shift that lead to emotional buying.
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We utilised user journey map tool to explore a typical mum's journey to motherhood starting from when buying might first occur. On this map we placed and synthesised emotional state, stress factors, systemic elements and social context that affect decision making in each step.

We also used a heatmap and correlation analysis to cross-reference common consumer behaviours with purchasing patterns and the identities most frequently portrayed in marketing and advertising targeted at mothers.

This was to understand behaviour and identity relationships that mothers want to adopt that might affect more or less purchasing activities.

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Once we determined our direction, we discussed and reshaped until we had aligned on a concept for Little Hamlet that resonated with the entire team, and our core insights. Then it was time to see what our users thought! We took the concept ideas for Little Hamlet, along with our corresponding key insights, into co-design sessions.
To best align to our participating mum’s schedules and constraints, we met mum’s 1-1, at a time and location of their choice, and engaged them in an insights validation and co-creation session, where we asked them to react to and engage first with our insights, and then with our ideas. During this process, we also asked them to contribute their additions, changes, and new ideas. We wanted to be sure we designed Little Hamlet with mum’s, not for them.

Ideation & Co-design along new mums and co-parents

The launch of Little Hamlet addresses the loneliness epidemic exacerbated by the smartphone revolution. While technology offers many benefits, it often lacks the trusted, personal connections that mothers need. Our team believes it is our duty to provide authentic, in-person services to foster organic connections and build long-term trusted relationships, confidence, and security—key factors in reducing impulse purchases during new parenting vulnerability, as revealed in our early analysis.

Our research shows a gap in services: many platforms offer information and digital communities, but few provide real, place-based services that support sustainable connection and consumption. Little Hamlet aims to fill this gap.

If I were to change anything about this project it would be to ideate longer, and explore more ideas in terms of business viability and innovation. It is so easy to accidentally create pastiche services with micro uniquenesses in a short timeframe. The solution would ideally have a stronger value proposition for Ikea and git in within their service and business ecosystem.

Key Learnings

Little Hamlet

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