Selina Finsler, MA Service Design 2025 – Beyond sight: Inclusive navigation
Smart travel tools for the blind and visually impaired
Why?
Switzerland is home to over 50'000 blind and 350'000 visually impaired people. While public transport supports their independence, it was not designed to meet their needs. This project aims to bridge that gap, making travel smarter, more accessible, and inclusive for everyone.
What?
This project provides smart tools that assist blind and visually impaired travelers navigate from planning to arrival. The digital and analog tools are seamlessly connected to transform complex connections into a smoother and more independent experience.
How?
By emphasizing user-centric design, prototypes undergo testing in real-world settings to guarantee usability. Looking forward, AI-driven features were developed to enhance travel intelligence.
For whom?
Although this project is designed for blind and visually impaired travelers, the solutions can also benefit older adults, people with mobility challenges, and anyone seeking a more accessible travel experience. Inclusivity means being made for many, not just a few
Societal Impact:
Promotes equal access to public transport, improving quality of life.
Community Impact:
Empowers marginalized groups, fostering independent mobility.
Industry Impact:
Supports compliance with laws, ensuring accessibility in public transport and improving user experience for all.
Idoia Paucar Herrera, MA Service Design 2025 – The Menopause mindset
Empowering women through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: rethinking menopause care with remote and family support.
Why?
Menopause affects nearly half the population, yet 75% of women report it disrupts their lives. Despite its complex symptoms and delayed research, stigma and educational gaps leave many unprepared, limiting access to mental health support and effective treatment.
What?
The Meno Toolkit equips menopausal women and their families with digital and analog tools to foster preparedness and better communication during this life stage. It includes an informational booklet, a journal, and an app with personalized Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and symptom tracking for mental health and symptom management.
How?
The design integrates physical resources with a digital app, the toolkit offers a seamless and accessible support system. The analog materials encourage meaningful conversations and selfreflection, while the app delivers remote support through personalized CBT, symptom tracking, and on-demand guidance.
For whom?
This design supports women navigating menopause and their families, particularly partners, by providing accessible, self-paced tools. It fosters communication, encourages family involvement, and provides tailored mental health support to help users navigate the menopause journey.
Impact:
This design empowers women to embrace menopause positively, strengthening family dynamics. It boosts confidence, resilience, and productivity by alleviating symptoms and improving mental health. It promotes emotional well-being for women, their families, and the broader community.
Camila Gutiérrez Meade, MA Service Design 2024, MA Design Award'24: Radical Niche – te-toca, Mind your tits
Breast awareness in young women
Breast cancer is a significant concern for young women worldwide, highlighting the importance of early detection and proactive health practices. This motivates me to advocate for breast health awareness and dispel myths among young women.
"Te-toca" is a holistic toolkit designed to empower women through breast awareness, self-care, and self-love. It promotes proactive health mindfulness by providing education and resources from an early age, with innovative features that challenge taboos surrounding women's health.
"Te-toca" aims to make a lasting impact by equipping women with the knowledge, confidence, and control over their health. It raises awareness, encourages early detection, and fosters a supportive community through its tools, educational content, and community engagement.
Targeted at young women aged 20+, "Te-toca" offers education, empowerment, and support to those who may be unaware of the importance of breast health or feel uncomfortable discussing these topics, helping them take charge of their well-being.
Rosarina Maria Sevilla MA Service Design 2024 – Lighten the Road
Simplifying assistance for patients and companions
In the Philippines, although affordable healthcare is a right, obtaining financial support can be a complicated and exhausting process. Patients and their companions often spend up to 12 hours daily in line, taking unpaid leave to complete the necessary procedures.
"E-ssistance" is a digital product-service system designed to simplify these financial transactions between patients, companions, medical social workers, local government staff, and funding organization representatives.
Through a digital platform and app, medical social workers can quickly assess patients’ financial needs and remotely request assistance. The platform also streamlines the processing of support requests for funding organizations.
"E-ssistance" aims to reduce the time, stress, and travel costs for patients and their companions while helping government and healthcare workers handle individual cases more efficiently.
Vera Frasson, MA Service Design 2023, MA Design Price'23: Step up to diversity!
A toolbox for a more inclusive cultural landscape
Diversity matters more than ever. Significant steps toward a more inclusive and fair future are required.
Diversity has a measurable positive impact on performance and well-being in the workplace. Cultural institutions lack strategies and comprehensive implementation despite an openness to embracing it.
The toolbox of information and workshop activities can help institutions to foster self-reflection and overcome the systematic discrimination of minority groups. The targeted stakeholders are core teams and organizers of cultural institutions who have the power and initiative to change from within.
Gloria Ntawuruhunga, MA Service Design 2023: Lausanne Lab
AI is used as a participatory tool to accelerate car-free futures for Lausanne residents.
Lausanne is considering removing cars from its urban area to reduce their carbon emissions. The accelerating climate crises demands that organizations and individuals co-design sustainable futures together. The “Lausanne Lab” is a workshop format that enables individuals and organizations to engage, explore and co-ideate potential car-free futures for their city. AI helps visualize strategies with boundary objects that serve as starting points for debate. In this participatory process, generative AI creates visualizations of speculative design scenarios. Workshop participants use the AI model to generate images based on a prompt. Designers serve as curators to help non-designers achieve their vision. Using AI as a creative director helps non-designers produce engaging and understandable visions faster. Using AI and boundary objects is cost-effective and easy to set up, making it an innovative and manageable approach for the local government.
Tamara Trabucco, MA Service Design 2023: Campus Collab
Bringing the university together, one project at a time.
Campus Collab offers a unique forum for students to develop skills, find projects and collaborators, and actively shape their learning experience.
The collaboration tool turns ideas into reality and fosters a supportive student community at HSLU.
The platform allows students to post their ideas, vote on projects and budgets, and cooperate in their realization. Campus Collab supports the needs and relations of university students. This innovative platform stimulates proactive students to team up with like-minded individuals.
Sabine Leuthold, MA Service Design, expected 2024: 360° Service Framework
A product is also a service. Ways to more sustainability - Mediation methods for SMEs
This thesis aims to support Swiss SMEs in effectively integrating sustainability into their business activities beyond common but limited measures to reduce their carbon footprint. Using a service design approach, the focus is placed on the environmental handprint of a company. The thesis successfully develops tools that allow a company to self-analyse its own environmental targets and track its progress.
Martin Dusek, MA Service Design 2022: Wunsch-O-Mat & other conversation tools
Interventions for inclusive city planning
A failed conversation between urban planners, landowners, and residents can lead to protests and write-offs in the millions. While participatory budgets (PB) involve the population in urban development, often they only reach an established middle class, thus reinforcing the prevailing power structures and excluding low-income groups and migrants. Taking LuzernNord as an example, this project proposes modifications to current approachess to Participatory Budgets. A set of conversation tools –including the Wunsch-O-Mat, a mix-and-match book – help planners engage with minorities they usually overlook. The tools enable local residents to formulate their needs in an accessible manner. The collected insights are translated into concrete measures with the help of planning experts. The unheard voices of residents are thereby included in the planning discussion about a city's future.
Marta Angelillis, MA Service Design 2022: A case for teamwork
Tackling waste management issues through community engagement
Addressing waste is not just an environmental issue; it concerns people’s needs, behaviors, and relationships. This project aims at leveraging the social aspects of human behavior to address complex waste management issues in an exemplary community in rural Italy.
Torremaggiore is a quiet agricultural town in southern Italy where about 60% of waste is recycled. Yet, waste is often left abandoned in and out of town, while part of the population is not engaged in recycling efforts. In fact, sustainable waste management practices are not yet acknowledged as legitimate and this generates tension.
Through a community engagement action, all community members - citizens, municipal representatives, waste management staff, environmental associations - come together to learn about waste management, share tips, questions, and engage in conversations with each other. The initiative sees each stakeholder play a different role while various social needs are uncovered and addressed.
This approach simultaneously promotes good practices and builds bridges among stakeholders, working as a model for enhancing public participation in similar communities as well as in other realms of the public sector.
Tim Heeb, MA Service Design 2022: Farewell Smartphone
Extend the service life of smartphones
Before upgrading your next smartphone, try to keep it for another year. This choice will save you money and help save the planet. Building a smartphone, specifically mining rare materials, represents approx. 80 % of the device’s total CO2 emissions.
“Farewell Smartphone” intervenes in all phases of the smartphone life cycle:
The first intervention in marketing & distribution helps you in the purchasing decision with an ecolabel. This label provides information about the carbon emission of the production and device durability considering repair, spare parts and battery life.
The second intervention in service life has the purpose to use your smartphone for longer by by creating a more meaningful bond. The engagement OS gives the user information about the use and makes regular sanity checks.
The third intervention is looking at the hibernation & reuse phase, where 60% of the unused smartphones end up in drawers. A new system allows the user to simply pass on the old device for further use, when swapping the smartphone. There the user benefits financially.
Farewell – a good and long life for smartphones.
Alexandra Gurtner, MA Service Design 2021: (in)visible mind
Mental health at the University Development of a holistic mental health strategy model and working tools
Mental illness is one of the most significant challenges of today's society - and students are also increasingly affected by it. Numerous factors, some of them individual, play a role - how students can be reached, supported and preventively trained in the best possible way.
"(in)visible mind" presents a strategy model and working tool for colleges and universities on how mental health can be addressed holistically and effectively. Ultimately, it's also about making the issue visible - because mental health affects us all.
Eva Vuckovic, MA Service Design 2021: Red Thread Project
A social entrepreneurship model to safeguard traditional textile handicrafts and empower the local artisan community
The project models an ethical production process that nurtures and maintains fading traditional handicrafts such as embroidery, weaving, lacemaking from the Podravina area, Croatia.
It empowers and encourages slow, manual work over the fast, mechanical while proposing handicraft as a strategy to achieve re-value in fashion objects and strengthening the product user-relationship. My role as a designer is to act as a facilitator in modeling sustainable enterprises in rural artisan communities while respecting the region's natural and cultural resources. The project's enterprise vision aims to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity, old and new, youth and seniority resulting in unique, handcrafted fashion objects conveying the story of rooted time, place, community, culture, and identity.
Aurelio Todisco, MA Service Design 2020: Lucerne for All
Paths of Inclusion
"Lucerne for All" is a design project that aims to improve the living conditions, social participation in urban life and access to solidarity structures of marginalized groups of people, especially refugees, including Sans-Papiers. In addition, the project promotes the activation and networking of the urban population, the organizations providing assistance, the solidarity structures and the municipal authorities. "Luzern für Alle" consists of a mobile application and offers recurring public events and participation opportunities. The analysis and research and the implementation of the project were carried out using design research methods. They focused on the participation of the target group and the project partners. The project partner is the alliance Solinetz Luzern.
