Spontanea

WHAT I DID - strenghts

As the only italian in the team my perspective was valuable in understanding the context of our project. I applied my analytical skills and intuition in framing the problem and suggesting an opportunity space. Further along the process I insisted on not loosing sight of the physical touchpoints, it’s increasingly easy to get lost into the digital product and forget about the real experience of the users. I also kept the focus on the ecosystem of similar offers and diverse stakeholders involved. During the user research and the validation I took care of crafting the boundary objects and the activities, I carried out interviews and led the participatory workshop.

WHAT I’VE LEARNED - progress

The main challenge of this project was coordinating the work alongside the academic endeavour and regular classes and project work of the semester, within a busy team. I’ve learned to work faster and to accept tradeoffs between sofistication and timeliness, and between ownership and trust. As part of the program we had the opportunity to attend interesting classes on systemic and participatory design, and take part into many feedback and tutoring session. I’ve learned to move more flexibly along the design process and pick and chose the best tools for the occasion, as a starting point that can always be modified and adapted to serve the designer and not the other way around.

WHAT I WOULD IMPROVE - reflections

Looking back at the process and even more at the outcome, and at the light of my new business studies, I would carry out a thourough market analysis of competitors and look for the realistic user base. Even more importantly though I would focus on prototyping from the start, not just to test UX/UI but to really challenge the underlying assumptions of the sensemaking and of the value offer.

Brief: Philips x Student Service Design Challenge 2025

“Philips seeks an innovative self- care service that elevates self-confidence as a central pillar in how individuals can actively enhance their wellbeing and overall quality of life.”

For more information you can read the full brief here.

The Competition:

“The Student Service Design Challenge is a global design award that celebrates, encourages and inspires the next generation of designers. It’s open to current students, and is supported by a group of trailblazing organisations and public entities, as part of their mission to involve young designers in finding people-centred and future-oriented services for people and the planet.”

Detailed rules and steps

The Challenge has five rounds.

Round 1 - Research proposal.
Only the best proposals will be selected to join the next Rounds of the Challenge.

Based on design processes like the Double Diamond, Design Thinking and Co-create Framework, the Design Teams need to walk through three steps: Empathise & Discover, Frame & Define, and Ideate & Develop.

Round 2 - Discover phase.
Round 3 - Define phase.
Round 4 - Develop phase.

Round 5 - Jury voting and winner announcement.
The Submissions will go through a round of judging, after which a shortlist will be selected. They will pitch their concept to the jury at a Dragons Den event. After that the winners will be selected.

We, the PULSE team, were shortlisted as finalist and competed in the Dragons Den, witnessing all the inspiring projects by our collegues from all over the world. Team Salamanders won the challenge, I invite you to check out their amazing work!

Exploration and Research Proposal

The starting point was the city of Milan and our own personal experiences in it. We discussed long about the meaning of self-care contextualizing it to this specific context rather than solely on abstract terms.

Every year, thousands of young people from across Italy and around the world come to Milan, a city renowned for its connection to innovation and creative industries, in search of new opportunities. In 2018 the Lombardia region saw internal mobility with 303 thousand registrations and 280 thousand deregistrations. This net balance highlights a broader failure in Lombardia, and Milan’s ability to support the long-term well-being of its youth. Faced with a competitive and fast-paced environment, many youngsters often prioritize their professional goals over their wellbeing. This group frequently encounters cultural clashes, complex legal procedures, challenges in finding housing, financial and professional uncertainty, and feelings of isolation, worsened by the rise of remote work and the normalization of individualistic practices. Within a few years, they often migrate to continue pursuing their dreams elsewhere, leaving the city with a large ageing population.

Giampaolo Nuvolati, an urban sociologist and Professor at Milano Bicocca, says it is typical of metropolis to be very crowded places where people are lonely because everyone is living their own personal narrative and elements of ideological and territorial belonging are missing, and with them the reasons for aggregation (M. Peretto, 2024). He argues people move to Milan to bet on their own success, renouncing social connections and familiarity they could foster in a different place; even when some communities are formed, they are temporary, because everyone is chasing their own individual success.

The practices adopted by young adults in Milan to take care of themselves, the resources at their disposal and some of the struggle they might stumble upon are illustrated in the following System Map.

Problem Framing
How might we develop a system that brings transient youth together, to develop self-care practices in Milan, and overcome the stresses of adulting in a metropolitan city? By cultivating such a social environment for well-being, we can help Milan retain its youth, indirectly addressing its rapidly aging problem.

For the detailed Research Proposal view the First Round delivery

Empathise & Discover

To further explore the topic and reframe the problem statement we proceeded with user research.

The main goal of this phase was to understand young people’s perception of living in Milan and how it has impacted their self-care practices. We wanted to explore why some decided to stay in Milan while others preferred a shorter experience. In addition, we investigated existing communities in Milan to find out how they emerge, sustain themselves, and provide value to their members. To achieve these goals, we adopted a qualitative research approach that included interviews, generative tools, and user diaries. Our participants included domestic and international migrants living in Milan, those who previously lived here and chose to leave, offering diverse perspectives on transitional experiences. Additionally, we interviewed community members and leaders who offered insights into community dynamics. We aimed to capture personal narratives and perspectives that highlight both the challenges and opportunities surrounding self-care practices in Milan. We interviewed 8 people from different backgrounds and with different stories.

Interviews and Boundary Objects

During the interviews we guided the conversation with the aid of some boundary objects:

Animal Deck: A series of pictures of animals that the interviewee is asked to choose from in order to answer a question in a metaphorical and symbolic way.

Energy Tower: A LEGO tower that represents a typical week in Milan. Each block symbolizes an activity from daily life. The size of the block reflects how much time the activity takes, and the color represents how it makes you feel: calm, energized, overwhelmed, or drained.

Findings

After completing our interviews, we gathered as a team to engage in an in-depth discussion, bringing together our individual perspectives and observations. To make sense of the insights we had gathered, we created an affinity map, carefully organizing and clustering related ideas to identify patterns and recurring themes across multiple interviews.

Once we completed the initial round of clustering, we continued our discussions, diving deeper into the connections between different insights. Through this process, we uncovered the major themes that consistently emerged from our conversations. We refined them in the next phase. For the detailed explanation of each theme view the Second Round delivery

Frame & Define

In this phase we iterated and went back to our findings; reframed them making them more insightful, clear and different from each other. To ground these findings, we began by presenting the experiences we’ve encountered through three stories: Bernarda, an Italian woman who transformed her understanding of Milan as she transitioned from student to finding her first job; Amit, an indian man who studied in Milan for a year; and Julia, a student who has built his self-esteem in Milan through her involvement in a CrossFit group.

Bernarda: When your perspective changes

Bernarda arrived in Milan from a small town in Piedmont to study, full of expectations. However, from the very beginning, she felt completely overwhelmed by the city. She mentions that the city seemed massive due to the distance between her home and her new friends’ places. She didn’t know how to navigate it and felt deeply disconnected. After a few years, she found her first job. Now, as she manages her bills and uses public transportation, she feels that the city’s vastness has shifted into a platform full of opportunities. Having now established her routines, she allows herself to explore the city, discovering and marveling at its diverse environments. Through this exploration, she feels the city has become her own. In the absence of planning her routes, Bernarda has found well-being that comes from serendipity.

Amit: When people don’t find proximity

Amit, on the other hand, remembers his time in Milan as an extremely fleeting period. He arrived with his girlfriend, and together, they shared most of their experiences in Italy. They met a couple of friends at the university they attended and only hung out with them a few days after classes. They went through a tough seasonal depression, which they tried to combat by doing yoga in-house, but they only found true enjoyment during their trips around the city, outside of the grey streets of Milan. Although they arrived with high expectations and a desire for change, they couldn’t channel that energy properly, and it turned into exhaustion and disappointment. Amit even mentions that if he had known from the start that he would be in the city for more than a year, he would have sought out communities or activities to connect more with the space through proximity. But at the moment he felt it wasn’t worth it, since planning activities felt overwhelming.

Julia: Physical activities and self-esteem

Julia arrived from Chile to pursue her master’s degree in Milan. From the very beginning, she faced a loss of self-esteem and well-being. Before coming to Italy, she was accustomed to exercising and maintaining a routine, but with so many overwhelming changes while starting a new life in Europe, she lost that habit and struggled with depression, which left her stagnant. It was at this moment that she realized she needed to find a solution. This is when she reconnected with her routines from Chile, with the hobby that had brought her well-being in her previous life, and used it as a source of motivation to join a CrossFit community in her neighborhood. She transformed an individual activity into the driving force to connect with her surroundings. She overcame her fear of speaking Italian and succeeded in connecting with people in her area through physical activity. Since then, she has nourished her self-esteem by strengthening these relationships. Now, she feels not only stronger in caring for her body, but also supported, with her self-esteem boosted by the proximity and connections she has formed. It is in these relationships that even spontaneous group activities now arise, which do not require exhausting planning.

The reframed insights are the following:

When socializing needs too much planning, it becomes overwhelming
Self-care is personal, but it’s more significant with others
Embodied practices create a sense of control
Familiar sports or activities boost self-confidence
Big gatherings spark smaller, lasting connections

We put together our five new insights and began looking for connections between them, trying to identify the common themes that tied them together. Using a method from the IDEO.org Design Kit called “Find Themes”, This helped us create a theme map that showed the most common themes and how they relate to each other.

Hobby:
Being spontaneous:
Public spaces:

Arriving in Milan can be seen as the act of diving into a body of water. It creates friction since there will be people at different speeds finding each other, everyone coming from different directions and with diverse motivations.

It can also be interpreted as starting to orbit around its core. You can get closer to finding social integration and proximity, or stay distant from the city’s spirit. Some people remain at a superficial level, losing momentum over time and leaving without much impact; others find, over time and through exploration, a path to a deeper connection, gaining proximity that nurtures their self-esteem.

Staying in the outermost orbit makes you feel like you are constantly running, being forced to plan and schedule every single activity in your day.

However, if you manage to leverage forces that propel you into an orbit closer to the core, you feel like you are running less, and experience more embodied activities throughout your day.

Self-care Drives Socializing

Self-care can be seen as an act that influences self-esteem. When people feel positive about themselves, they are more likely to act in healthy ways and present self-care. These actions of self-care shape how others perceive and treat them, looping back to reinforce how they feel about themself. This forms a reinforcing loop between acts of self-care and self-esteem.

We noticed that participants leveraged this self-esteem to step out of their comfort zone and socialize in an otherwise daunting unfamiliar city.

In the diagram, this is visualized through two interlinked reinforcing loops:

The first loop revolves around individual acts of self-care and self-esteem
The second loop revolves around acts of self-care in a community setting and self-esteem
The connection between the loops can be seen as the environment or the physical and social conditions required to allow the self-esteem gained from individual action to drive community participation

Reframing of the Design Question

How might we use the capacity of transient youth flowing into Milan to create an environment that enables the dynamic population of the city, to uplift each other’s self-esteem through shared spontaneous embodied activities?

Ideate & Develop

After the thorough analysis, we moved to the synthesis part of the work. We carried out internally in the team a few iterations of ideation sessions and then sketched our version 0 concept of the service.

Instead of focusing on details right away, we sought validation and feedback through a codesign workshop with other students who had moved to Milan and who recognised themselves as transient in this phase of their lives.

The main boundary object for the workshop was an offering map to help navigate the service, which we also used as a desktop walkthrough.

Having iterated again on the concept based on the feedback and insights received we moved on to develop the service.

Spontanea

Spontanea helps transient youth build self-care habits through spontaneous meetups, exploring local activities, connecting with neighbors, and gaining confidence in a new city. Powered by diverse event platforms and community-suggested activities, it takes the pressure off planning or hosting, making self-care fun and surprising even when life is in motion.

Their time in a place may be limited but that doesn’t mean their capacity for selfcare should be. Rather than building systems to retain them, the aim is to help them stay well while they are here, however briefly.

Offering Map

Spontanea offers three types of experiences: for neighborhoods, for attendees, and for those ready to host.

Attendees:

Our main offering is designed for people seeking to reconnect with their well-being and build selfconfidence while exploring the city and settling into their new home. We’ve crafted a service that removes the burden of planning activities. Users receive last-minute spontaneous and personalized invitations to attend local experiences: some hosted by fellow users, and others curated from public platforms. Spontanea acts as a matchmaker, simplifying the decision-making process and helping users participate effortlessly.

Finally, by attending events, users can contribute to the collective story of their neighborhood by sharing photos and leaving behind a visible, meaningful trace in the life of the community.

Hosts:

After attending a few events, users may be invited to become hosts themselves, earning small payments in exchange for opening up their everyday activities to others in the neighborhood. The idea is simple: turn your personal routines into opportunities for connection. Hosts are usually people who’ve found a rhythm in the city and feel grounded enough to support others who are still finding their way.

The Neighborhood:

Each neighborhood connected to Spontanea’s care system has a living map of all the past activities and memories shared through the platform. It’s a collective archive of experiences footprints left behind by transient people who have come and gone, each leaving the place transformed.

Additionally, each neighborhood will periodically receive surprise visits from the Spontanea Truck: a pop-up event space designed to foster community gatherings, reflect on the neighborhood’s evolution, and highlight the impact of spontaneous care. These events celebrate local identity and are particularly effective in engaging new residents eager to discover the hidden potential of their new home.

Blueprint

To develop the details we mapped everything that the service entails into the following blueprint.

Business Consideration

Importantly in designing the service we took into account the economic sustainability of the project and the value created for all the stakeholder involved. To do so we used the tool of the Business Model Canvas and a System Map. Fundamental stakeholders besides the users are the local businesses and the municipality of Milan.

Specifically the value it brings to the municipality is as follow:
The city receives access to anonymized and aggregated data on how public spaces are used and what kinds of well-being activities people engage in. These insights help identify needs for public infrastructure, such as equipment, safe spaces, or community initiatives.

The service also aligns with the goals of the Social Prescribing EU consortium, which advocates for integrating non-clinical, community-based interventions into public health systems. By providing real-time, localized data, Spontanea can help inform municipal social prescribing pathways, making it a practical tool for implementing care strategies at the city level.

Communication and UX/UI

Finally we curated the visual identity of the brand and sketched a wireframe of the UX for the main touchpoint: the Spontanea app. You can find the wireframe and a quick first concept of the UI on Figma.