MINIMUM
Third year elective group project
Minderoo Foundation
Experience Design
Service Design
Minderoo Foundation’s brief, focusing on their flourishing oceans initiative, was “What does a world-leading marine experience need to look like in 2026 to help visitors see, understand, love and act for a flourishing ocean?”
The Spark
Young experience seekers told us about climate change “I think there are times when I feel a bit helpless. Like I could do all that I can individually, but unless there’s bigger systemic changes, nothing will happen” and “I would like to do more for the environment but I wouldn’t go out of the way to change my normal life”.
The Problem
Anxious young adults need to feel like they have the power to create change because in the face of the seemingly insurmountable climate emergency, they enter flight mode.
The Question : How might we bring the ocean into the home?
The Outcome
Shower without stress with a TENCEL Lyocell bath towel that uses 80% less water than cotton. Minimum enables you to take easy action and make better consumer choices by being conscious of textile production methods.
My Contribution
We all contributed to all stages of the design thinking process to develop our concept. I researched culture trends, created an empathy map and user profile, did four user interviews, website graphics, and the pitch presentation.
Empathy Map
After doing six interviews within our customer segment of young experience seekers (age 18-39), we compiled an empathy map to consolidate our understanding of this target audience. We were curious about the thoughts and feelings that motivated their behaviour and, moving forward, delved into why this was.
User Profile
Based on the empathy map, we also created a user profile. This helped us to understand the motivating factors behind behaviour, including needs and attitudes/beliefs. This profile became a reference point we could use to test our ideas against.
Customer Jobs / Affinity Mapping
We explored customer jobs to narrow the scope of the problem we were addressing. By affinity mapping the jobs, we could see the common themes in what young experience seekers need help to do. We combined similar ideas to create more robust customer jobs to base our problem statement on.
Journey Mapping
Focus on showering, we knew our idea would need to integrate easily into people’s shower routines to encourage behaviour change. We started off exploring our routines through journey mapping. Surprisingly, we found we all had very different experiences, particularly emotionally. We needed to learn more about how people shower.
Survey Insights
We surveyed 44 young experience seekers to understand the diverse experiences people have showering. We identified a theme of conflicting pain and gain points, where people are conscious of their water usage but don’t want to stress over it because they value their relaxation time. Therefore, the challenge was, ‘How might we save water without sacrificing relaxation in the shower?’.
Branding
‘Minimum’ encompasses having the smallest possible impact throughout the entire supply chain. The tagline answers the challenge question and appeals to the consumer’s emotions. The colour palette ties in with the ocean and is bright and hopeful, as our cultural research emphasised that climate optimism is essential in helping ease climate anxiety.