This is an ongoing project with INGKA, IKEA Financial Services.
It seeks to answer the question:
"How might we make students in Copenhagen feel more settled?"
with a focus on how one's economical situations influences one's feeling of settleness.
Since this is a super complex and wicked problem, we're working in sprints and approaching it from different perspectives, and I'll go through some of them here. 
The key elements however are empathy, community and participation
The reason we settled on settleness (pun intended) was because of a self-ethnography within our team (mine is seen above). Initially, we wanted to map our journeys of moving to Copenhagen, since this is one of the biggest financial decisions we had made. However, we realised that the moving itself was not the whole journey - there is also a before and after, which can take several years.Therefore we choose to focus on settleness as the final goal.
But: how do you even define feeling settled? To figure out, what makes people feel settled, we did a two-part information gathering. 
First, we asked 32 students at our campus, what made them feel settled, what information they needed to achieve it, where they would get that information, and how finances were related to that. 
Secondly, we had them add words to a wordcloud, that to them described the feeling of settleness - where words like "home", "comfortable", "peace" and "community" were quickly forming the center.
We have also explored potential concept ideas through video sketching - one of them is here on the right!

Remember to put on sound!
To be continued... 
Stuff you can expect: Theory of Change, expert interviews, rapid prototyping, participatory workshops
Back to Top