The project was undertaken as a group with Suvi Majander, Banhee Lee, Loren Cordoba and Ziyi Pei as part of the Designing for Services course at Aalto University. The client was the city of Espoo.

<aside> 📅 - 2020

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<aside> ⌛ - 6 weeks

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<aside> 🔖 - Service Design

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<aside> 📍 The brief was to design future solutions for the museum. After intensive desk and field research using some custom, contextual design probes, we redefined the brief to accommodate the potential of the museum's role in its locality. We then designed three experiments that would provide learnings, evidence and metrics to drive the museum in any chosen direction.

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The Lagstad School Museum is a beautiful, historic and charming hidden gem right in the centre of Espoo city. It has been 17 years since the oldest school building in Espoo has been transformed into the museum we see today. The Espoo city museum is hoping to breathe new life into the school museum and attract new audiences by offering new services and finding new stakeholders to collaborate with.

The initial brief included three main themes to achieve this goal:

domestic internationality, local community and self-service museum concept.

Domestic internationality is part of the broader internationalization strategy of Espoo City (Espoo, 2019). Considering that Espoo is rapidly becoming multicultural with almost 20% of the population’s mother tongue is a language other than Finnish or Swedish (City of Espoo, 2020). The city wishes to actively respond to these changes, it seems natural to think about how to commit local people from diverse backgrounds to the museum.

Our research took 3 main forms:

Desktop Research

Looking at existing solutions, case studies, research papers, and other ancillary systems.

In-person site visits and interviews

Visiting the museum, other similar spaces, the neighbourhood, etc. We also conducted interviews with members of the local associations and the museum staff.

Design Probes

Using visual design probes with the local inhabitants to try and understand their needs and relationship to the area.

The data from this research was then analysed in a series of brainstorming sessions. The analysis from which led to define a new, more focused and reframed brief.

The reframed brief was to design a safe, non-commercial space for the locality around the museum which would be entertaining and educational.

Our project ultimately looked to provide the museum not with a finished, ready solution, but a framework for future development and experimentation, which could bring a new experience for individuals, and to transform it into a place that has new roles and responsibilities in the community.

Our project would focus on moving the Lagstad School museum to a more modern form of a museum.

Thus, our "solutions" took the form of 3 experiments that would serve as a form of service prototyping. Service prototypes can be used to explore, evaluate and communicate design ideas and concepts in a more flexible and economical manner, with the learnings being vital to developing more meaningful solutions for the Lagstad School museum.