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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

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.

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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?

Design

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!

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Before

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After

DESIGN

Form Redesign

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Sorting Guide Poster

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SOME ROOM REDESIGN DETAILS

Before

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Before

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After

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After

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We painted the wall

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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Click to enlarge the image👆

Stakeholder Analysis

DESIGN PROCESS

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Research

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Synthesis

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Ideation

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Pilot & Validation

RESEARCH

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Observation

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Interviews

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Culture Probe

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Case Studies

Research

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.

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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.

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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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Process Mapping

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.

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Tuesday Sorting 

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Wednesday DIstribution

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Click to enlarge the image👆

Servicescape

SERVICESCAPE

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Wednesday Distribution Process Servicescape

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SYTHESIS

Understanding Pain Points

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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Ideas Prioritization Workshop

Paper Desktop Walkthrough Workshop 

Cocreation Workshop
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