Redesign - Emmaus House Clothing Closet
CHALLENGE
The Savannah Clothing Closet is presently operated by Emmaus House in collaboration with community volunteers, they provide clean and essential clothing and hygiene items weekly to anyone in line. Some individuals arrive with a small request, while others need everything, how can a small and mighty organization fueled by volunteers' energy continue to sustain the community through these valuable resources and handle the growth in needs and donations?
DELIVERABLES
Systems improvement, analyze, observe, interact, and provide solutions for more helpful systems within the clothing closet distribution and storage.
Develop internal and external process and system enhancements with stakeholders.
DURATION
Sep - Nov, 2022
MY ROLE
Paper Walkthrough prototyping
System Mapping
Workshop Facilitation
Stakeholder Management
TEAM
Liuyun Hu
Siyun Lu
Chongyuan Yin
Shailjia Patel
Robin Owens
BACKGROUND
The Savannah Clothing Closet, started in 2014, attempts to fill a vital gap for those experiencing homelessness: acquiring clean and suited clothing. While shelters might provide some shelter and soup kitchens provide food, many left in-between need goods like clothing, backpacks, and tents. The Clothing Closet, run in partnership with Emmaus House, Epiphany Church, and SCAD Serve, operates every Wednesday morning to serve its clients, as well as has volunteers sort and clean the clothing the day before.
How can we help EMMAUS HOUSE Clothing Closet increase the efficiency of the service and handle the growth in needs and donations?
1
What are the best ways/channels to increase volunteers and clothing donations at the clothing closet?
2
How can we improve the efficiency of the Clothing closet process?
3
How can we better serve the clients who come to Emmaus House?
4
In what ways can we use the Clothing Closet to meet longer terms needs, help people who experiencing homeless out, and increase equity?
OUR DESIGN
Instead of redesigning the volunteering space, we designed a whole service that includes strategy, space, and all physical and touch points for Emmaus House.
In this tutorial video, we provided the new process we redesigned for EMMAUS HOUSE volunteers so that they can quickly know how to do the volunteer work.
IMMEDIATE IMPLEMENTATION
Let's take a look at what we've done so far!
Before
After
DESIGN
Form Redesign
Sorting Guide Poster
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SOME ROOM REDESIGN DETAILS
Before
Before
After
After
We painted the wall
LONG TERM STRATEGY
We delivered a future service long-term map for Emmaus House, it includes future scenarios of how the Clothing Closet service can be operated through the digital form, and different roles responsible for different tasks.
Click to enlarge the image👆
UNDERESTANDING STAKEHOLDERS
In order to understand our stakeholders' context and what value they exchange with each other, we talked with different stakeholders involved in the Clothing Closet service.
UNDERSTANDING SYSTEMS
The ecosystem map identifies all the people or organizations involved in the whole service system. Our stakeholders were people who experiences homelessness and Emmaus House who provided the service for them, volunteers who participated whole Clothing Closet service process. Other stakeholders included christ church, the church of Epiphany, the community of St. Joseph, homeless authority.
Click to enlarge the image👆
DESIGN PROCESS
Research
Synthesis
Ideation
Pilot & Validation
RESEARCH
Observation
Interviews
Culture Probe
Case Studies
Observation
We conducted observation in the Clothing closet space, from the sorting place to the distribution place, we
Through observation of the Clothing Closet sorting and distribution process, maps were able to be created of the journey of the volunteer, as well as the layout of the Clothing Closet.
Interviews
2
Staff members
4
Volunteers
2
key stakeholders
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Culture Probe
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Case Studies
We looked up some cases about how to arrange shelves more efficiently, and how clothes can be folded and thang up properly.
PROCESS MAPPING
From previous data collection, we started to map the workflow of EMMAUS HOUSE, the experiences of the whole process, especially the actions, pain points, movements, and opportunities of volunteers, staff, and our clients.
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Service Workflow of Clothing Closet Service
There are 2 main service processes that happened in the Clothing Closet Service after we finished all the research, we started to map out these two main processes including the Tuesday clothing sorting process and the Wednesday Distribution process. Then started to analyze the pain points and opportunities we can redesign these whole processes.
Tuesday Sorting
Wednesday DIstribution
Click to enlarge the image👆
SERVICESCAPE
Wednesday Distribution Process Servicescape
SYTHESIS
Understanding Pain Points
After identifying the four key phases of The Clothing Closet, we started to identify all the pain points collected during our research to best understand how they interacted with each other.
Understanding Connections
We then grouped and moved the pain points to understand the way the different phases interact with each other to determine larger insights about their connections.
DESIGN OPPORTUNITIES
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IDEATION CO-CREATION WORKSHOP
We put all the ideas we came up with and did the ideation session with our all stakeholders including Clothing Closet volunteers, staff, interior designer.
We made a space prototype firstly for test the stakeholder's characters with the place concept, and get feedback from stakeholders then change the label.
Volunteers, interior designers, directors, and staff who work in the Clothing Closet service all trying to move the different blocks to reimagine the room and movement lines
Ideas Prioritization Workshop
Paper Desktop Walkthrough Workshop