Service Design (MA)
Beatrice Mandelstam
My practice reflects my work as both a textile and service designer, with an interest in how we communicate across materials, experiences, and services. I have an undergraduate degree in Textile Design, and I began my career in trend research, art direction, and styling, exploring how to use speculation and photography to create future foresights.
Service design has given me the context and skills to connect creative strategy to socially conscious and systems-oriented design. At the RCA, I worked on live projects with Alpha Telefonica, Stampede International, InHouse Records and the Ministry of Justice. In my final project at the RCA, I partnered with IKEA, using speculative design methods to find new ways into designing for one of the most basic human needs—sleep.
For my final MA project, I worked with fellow student Jess Stein, in collaboration with IKEA of Sweden. IKEA has led research since 2016 into future sleep value spaces, exploring how to expand its traditional sleep offering in an evolving sleep market.
Our work began with a reflection on sleep and anxiety, and recent discussions around the futility of and harm caused by the use of sleep tracking devices and apps. This led to a series of small experiments into the mapping of journeys—how can we talk about, draw, and describe our own sleep in terms other than hours? What happens when we “go to bed”? We gathered 20+ hours of user home walkthrough footage over Zoom, creating a visual diary around sleep to explore sequencing, product interactions, and the stories that make up our sleep journeys.
This exploration suggested a ‘before’ that falls out of the traditional time frame in which designers map a user’s journey to bed. We typically begin our journey to sleep after dinner, yet this ‘before’ period, and its associated decisions and artefacts, are not connected to sleep. The word ‘sleep’ triggers fixed imagery and associations linked to the bedroom and late evening—our hypothesis was that there were opportunities to design for sleep in these moments ‘before’ if we expanded the framing and opened the language around what was considered ‘sleep’.
In response, we developed a speculative fictional scenario around a ‘before’ sleep phase—and bioluminescent reaction—known as Rey, drawing from our research into the history of monophasic and polyphasic sleeping patterns. This fictional narrative and structure gave us a place from which to design for the ‘before’, and we designed an IKEA homeware range and catalogue for Rey.
(1) Early project interest area: reflecting on market’s focus on sleep disorders and the framing of sleep as a “problem”
(2) Home walkthrough research into sleep journeys
(3) Project focus: Limits of language used to describe our sleep and the importance of the ‘before’
(4) Early prototype and user story development
(5) IKEA REY Catalogue
Through this project, we also looked to reflect upon ways into service design research using language, semiotics, and history. To test this approach, we developed a set of tools to prototype using language as part of the design process. We were interested in how to engage designers with extended sleep journeys, as well as how frameworks from semiotics and depictions of sleep within literature and history might encourage expansiveness within sleep design. We then invited responses from product designers, set designers, and textile designers to a set of briefs focused on expanded sleep journeys. From these responses, we have created the beginnings of a product catalogue for the ‘before’.
This work brought together different threads of interest, namely how to present stories from user research, different ways into a service design project using speculation and historical research, and an interest in semiotics and the signifiers/signified of sleep.