What if storing your belongings was as easy as uploading computer files to the cloud? What if you had access to everything you own wherever you go? Shelve is an all-round management service for your physical possessions that reimagines how you store, share and use your belongings.
No more digging through cardboard boxes in your parents' basement to find the camping gear for the weekend trip. No more asking around to borrow a camera to capture the best moments of the upcoming hike. Shelve offers a quick and easy access to your own inventory and to your friends' shared items through an online platform.

How it works

Shelve will pick up any belongings that you want to store with them, and allows you to manage these digitally through a companion app. Through the app, you will have a full overview of all the items that you have stored with Shelve, and can choose to share these with trusted friends or have it delivered back to you anytime, no matter where you are. You can also borrow any items that your friends have shared with you, making better use of expensive equipment that is rarely used.
Customers can choose between a subscription model or pay as you go, depending on their storage needs.

Background

In a world of mass consumption coupled with huge amounts of waste, how can we shift people's behaviour around ownership? Can we take better stock of our shrinking living spaces and the things we already own?

These were some of the questions we wanted to tackle with Shelve. In developing this service concept, we wanted to marry the idea of storing physical belongings with digital storage: to have your personal belongings be as easily accessible and shareable as any digital file. Through this service, we want to encourage a new kind of ownership – a shared ownership between a community of trusted friends, while retaining a sense of control over our posessions.

Process

Over the course of 3 weeks the process involved user research, experience prototyping, blueprinting, concept refinement and developing a business model.

The Brief

Design an innovative holistic service that enhances the mobility of people or things in an urban environment.
Our given target group for this brief was Delivery & Logistics.

Research

We needed to get a handle on this very broad topic, and form a picture of what the delivery chain for a variety of goods looks like. We began by talking to as many people as we could who were involved in the delivery chain. We conducted both guerrilla and in-depth interviews with truck drivers, small business owners, movers, postal workers and individuals who had just moved across international borders to get a sense of what logistics means to them.

The research helped us to narrow down on our target group - people who had just moved to a new country. The main reason why we chose this target group is that only little effort has been made to develop services and solutions to cater to the specific needs of this audience. The logistics of deliveries as such on the other hand have been thought through well.

Experience prototyping

After we settled on the rough idea for a personal belongings management service, we began experience prototyping the key moments within the service.

• Storage
• Management of stored items
• Retrieval

We prototyped each moment with 3 respondents, which helped us to understand what worked and what didn't. What we learned from one respondent also helped us to refine some details, which were then tested with the next respondent. Some of the issues that we encountered were concerns regarding the privacy and reliability of the service and problems around labelling, packaging and the transportation of items. We drafted and continuously updated a service blueprint to incorporate these learnings.
We realised that the respondents have different needs when it comes to the frequency of retrieving and storing their belongings. As a result we developed a business model that comprises a pay as you go as well as a subscription model.

Contribution

Throughout all phases of this project I was involved in the design and implementation of SHELVE. I went outside and did field research and then synthesized the experiences into insights. I fleshed out the service blueprint together with the rest of the team. In order to test the draft of the service blueprint I carried out a prototyping session with one of our respondents. As a team we developed the concepts for the advertisement videos. I directed the filming of the videos and acted in one of them.

Additional Videos

Links: Sign up for Shelve here | Service Design Award - Core77 Design Awards 2018