COVID-19 is raging across the world, significantly impacting the global society and economy, while also bringing noticeable changes to our personal and professional life. This February, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations China Office has acted promptly together with the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University, to adjust and reorganize the joint postgraduate course Service Design into an e-learning process focusing on social challenges during the pandemic. Now let’s check out what innovative solutions had students come up with as course outputs after finishing their learning journey!

Course Theme

Defined as the theme of this course, “Design Out Isolation” encompasses not only physical distancing, but also psychological “isolation” as well as social “segregation” at a deeper level. While physical separation has only kept us from living our daily life in regular ways, for some of us, being psychological “isolated” could mean unable to get together with our closest friends and families, or to receive emotional support during extremely difficult times. On a deeper level, some could even experience a sense of social “segregation”, such as the feeling of homelessness for Hubei drivers who stuck in the highway, or tourists who are unable to make a way back to their own home.

The completion of this course was facilitated by online interviews as well as remote workshops and expert guidance in response to the difficulty to conduct onsite field research. A number of professionals were invited from international agencies, non-profit organizations, academia and the private sector to provide course participants with a multi-faceted perspective on social issues during the pandemic.

Paige Snider, Senior Adviser from WHO Representative Office for China, described the challenges facing WHO in the course, and shared several effective measures along with difficulties observed by WHO when responding to the outbreak in China. Dong Le, Poverty Reduction and Innovation Officer at FAO Representative Office in China, participated in the course and presented FAO's experience in food systems. Prof. Fu Zhiyong and Dr. Zhong Fang from the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University, provided students with guidance from a professional perspective of service design. In addition, experts and industry leaders from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Alibaba Group, Nanjing Community Development Center and other fields were also deeply involved to give course guidance and homework assessment.

Course Outputs

Throughout the eight-week course, students had delved into various social and livelihood issues caused by the separation during the pandemic, and tried to consummated their solutions from different perspectives including service delivery platform, community service, public health, food health, and etc. By transforming social challenges into the starting-point of innovation, participates of this course put forward innovative solutions such as " Life Circle—Smart Community Living Platform", "Restaurant Community Membership Applet", “Community Balcony – Online Psychological Mutual Support Platform", “Design Every Detail for Resuming School”, and "Entertaining Education Platform: Musaic".

Among these solutions, "Restaurant Community Membership Applet" focused on the difficulties facing small-scale restaurants during the pandemic, hoping to help with their transition towards conducting business online while also achieving digital management. Targeting at the pain point in the special time, the team proposed the applet with solutions addressing the operating strategy, campaign & promotion, obtaining of market information and, protection measures during the outbreak of these food vendors, so as to help them attract customers by constructing a community-based catering service with the distinctive advantage of these small-scale restaurants.

Ag-LabCx

Service Design Thematic Research is one of the collaborations under the Ag-LabCx, an agricultural innovation lab established by FAO China Office. The course combines the expertise of FAO in agriculture with the strength of the Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University on designing, to jointly explore agricultural innovation.

Supported by China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (CFPA) in 2019 spring, the previous Service Design Thematic Research ended up with raising five innovative solutions basing on the local condition of Hani Terraces of Yunnan Province, while also launched the “Honghe Innovation Plan” to incubate and apply these solutions in support of the poverty reduction and sustainable development of local Hani community.

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