“No Design”-Designs: A Service Design Case Study

Inside Sip of Hope Coffee Bar

For my team’s service design project, our goal was to further the mission of Sip of Hope, a coffee shop in Logan Square that donates 100% of its profits to suicide prevention and mental health awareness.

Research & Synthesis

We visited Sip of Hope and two other coffee shops, The Wormhole and Caffe Streets, and interviewed 15 people in those coffee shops.

Key Insights

1. Different coffee shops meet different needs for different people. People went to one coffee shop if they wanted to work and another if they wanted to meet friends.
2. Regulars go because of convenience or quality of coffee.
3. People know how to act in a coffee shop by looking at how others act.
4. Paperwork wasn’t impactful and people didn’t remember signage.
5. The idea of “inclusive” depends on the people in the space. People, especially LGBTQ and those with mental health issues, looked to the baristas and clientele of the coffee shop to determine quickly if they were welcome in the space.

“Any place is for [genderqueer and nonbinary people], it’s just whether or not the population is supportive.”

The Collective Alone

A theme that kept emerging was the idea of the collective alone. When we observed on a Monday morning and afternoon, everyone at Sip of Hope was alone. Even on a Saturday afternoon, at least half of the people at Wormhole Coffee were alone and only two people in Caffe Streets were together talking, though they had come on their own and just ran into each other.

People talked about not wanting to go to the library because it was too quiet. People used the communal tables with strangers, but they stayed focused on their own work and ignored everyone else. The major reason for this seemed to be that people wanted to be around others, but not have to interact with them.

A secondary reason? Some had no real privacy at home. Kayla, a mom of two, came to the busy Wormhole to have alone time and read a book. She felt she had more privacy in a room full of strangers who weren’t paying attention to her.

Who is the Audience?

Sip of Hope tries to reach two groups of people:

1. They try to raise awareness for mental health among the general public
2. They try to create a space where people with mental health issues are comfortable.

But we realized that we couldn’t design a space for people with mental health issues, because (1) we all have mental health issues; and (2) designing for people with mental health issues is an act of “othering.” We want to be inclusive and treat everyone with empathy.

Design Principles

1. Solutions should prioritize maintenance — not crisis — by providing resources that support mental health for everybody.
2. Solutions should enable people to form their own experiences by creating a service that fosters self-expression.

A “No-Design” Design

A Room of One’s Own

To fulfill both design principles, we created soundproofed rooms that let people release their emotions and create art at the same time. The room would convert the user’s sounds into visual art that would be combined with others and that art would play in the individual rooms and in the coffee shop in real time.

A user could let out their feelings in any way in this room.

Art that could be made from the sounds in the room.

User Testing & Reiterations

After six user tests People said they generally wouldn’t use a “soundproofed room you could use to blow off steam” in the back of a coffee shop because:

They think of a coffee shop as a place to go to calm down and relax

• “I don’t think of a coffee shop as a place where I go to blow off steam.”

They don’t think making loud noise would make them feel better

• “My version of blowing off steam is usually not loud.”
• “For me productivity is a better way to channel that frustration.”
• “It’s not how I do things.”

But, people thought the idea of having their sound and/or movement turned into art sounded very cool. People also said they often sing, listen to music, talk with friends, build, or create art to relax or calm down.

SO …

We rebranded the room as a place to go to turn your voice into art. We changed language on door console and added a table and chair to the rooms to expand the ways people could use the room.

Click here to view the project `Service Design-Sip of Hope`

Other Facets of the Sip of Hope Environment

To fulfill the first design principle about maintenance, we added to the environment of the coffee shop. Balancing a need for subtlety while still highlighting the resources Sip of Hope provides was key.

1. Plant Walls because green space is very important for urban dwellers.
2. Seasonal drinks with ingredients that can benefit mental health (without advertising them as such).
3. A small sign by the register with the names of the baristas and a note that said they were certified in mental health first aid.
4. A “Thank You” sign on the door to cultivate feelings of gratitude.
5. Moving the mental health resources that Sip of Hope already provides from the entrance to the bathroom hallway, so people are not looking through them in front of everyone in the coffee shop.

Next Steps

1. Creating the rooms and art installation, which would require front-end developers, data scientists, art installers, sound experts, and probably many others.
2. Testing out the physical space and receiving feedback from users.

This will be a lot of work, but we believe the end goal is worth it:

To create a space where our voices, our sounds, and even all that noise in our heads are made beautiful.