Spotlight

Executive Summary

Improve campus allergy awareness and epinephrine access. Our team focused on supporting incoming students with allergies.

We focused on ethnographic research as well as understanding the current support system. We developed a service to address tensions for students, parents and the university.

Personal Responsibilities

Design directions and leadership
Insights and synthesis of findings
Visual communication of findings
Spotlight Brand Standards

Deliverables

Service blueprint
Strategy for implementation
Communication visuals

Welcome to Spotlight

Spotlight is a 5 part service created to address allergy awareness and epinephrine accessibility on campus.

By creating a 5 team consultancy, called Vault, our Service Design course tackled this multifaceted challenge by identifying various touch points throughout the journey of students with allergies, as well as related stakeholders around them. By working with leading specialist Dr. Ruchi Gupta at Northwestern Medical we created a cohesive service that is desirable from the students' perspective as well as those around them.

By navigating the design process we identified opportunity areas, conducted in-depth research, prototyped and tested solutions, created implementation plans and finally presented and reviewed our work with various stakeholders including members of Northwestern Medical (including Dr. Gupta and her team), members of dining services and planning, members of Food Allergy and Research & Education (FARE) and more.

Preparing for college

While many of our classmates focused on touchpoints during the student's journey in college we decided to tackle how students with allergies, and their parents, prepare for college; including who they call, what they look for, what resources they find invaluable and what tricks and workarounds they do to feel safe.

Our most important insight after hours and hours of research (with both parents and students) is the following:

Students feel lost and confused about who they need to contact to prepare for college with allergies, which causes them and their parents a lot of stress.

Spotlight Cares

Through our portion of the Spotlight service (that we call Spotlight Cares) we prepare incoming students with allergies to be safe in college by putting them in touch with the resources and people they need through a care package, phone calls from key stakeholders and on-campus visit day. By providing this service the university can better protect and advocate for it's students, showing them that the university cares and understands the severity of this matter.

We take the burden of preparing for college and getting in touch with the right people, away from the students and their parents and place it on the university.

Care package

Our care package is a personalized package for each student that includes various types of information, from dining hall info, to visit day logistics, to an app we created to keep track of on and off campus eating options to chef cards for off campus dining to fun gear to get them excited about coming to school. Meanwhile the students are receiving calls from Dining services, Housing staff and Disabilities offices to prepare any special needs they may have in school.

Moving forward

We shared our research, findings, solutions and insights with Dr. Gupta, her team and other stakeholders, like members of FARE, dining services and more. We created steps to implementation for the university to finalize our solution as well as steps for other universities to implement the Spotlight Cares service on their campus.