Disha Mittal

Hi! I’m Disha, a service designer with a background in product and systems design.

Forever inspired and excited by meaningful services that are holistic, i.e. planet and human centred, I love to work at the crossroads of different design disciplines. I graduated with a degree in Industrial Arts and Design Practices from Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology. During my undergraduate program, I explored different disciplines of art & design, media and contexts to find a singular discipline to base my practice on. What emerged from that process was the realisation that designing solutions for problems are never contained within one discipline. It is this understanding that motivated me to pursue my Masters in Service Design, which I believe has the ability to transcend the limitations that these disciplines are bound by.

In the last few years I have worked on a breadth of projects centred around environmental sustainability, social innovation, meaningful user experiences, business strategy and design research. During my Masters, I’ve also had the chance to collaborate with students from different fields across RCA, Imperial College and the London Business School, that has helped me learn the business related implications of service design.

My strengths lie in qualitative research and systems design, that I've been able to hone over the past few years in a range of projects- whether it was designing meaningful user journeys of new Vivobarefoot customers to increase brand engagement or helping co-design craft practices with the tribal communities in Araku Valley, India.

During my time at a design research agency, I contributed to a breadth of projects ranging from researching digital workspaces of businesses for Google to conducting global research for Spotify.

Most projects I have worked on in the past have required me to go through the design process from start to end. Because of this, I understand every part of the design process, and having used it in design disciplines of visual, product and service systems design in a variety of contexts has equipped me with a deeper understanding of how design thinking can be applied, tailored to each project. Although I have worked across different contexts, each project is grounded in strong design research and analysis that provides a robust foundation to pin down that wicked problem and then conceive of ways to solve it.

Achievements:

Terra Carta Design Lab: Finalists for the last round, with our project inC2

Imperial Innovation Challenge: Third Prize

Worked in collaboration with a team of MBA students to develop a go-to market strategy for a new concrete technology

Distinction: For research paper titled ‘Service Design for the Circular Economy’

Publishing in Progress: Research paper ‘Play: A Way To Contextualise Learning’

A lot of my ongoing work revolves around environmental sustainability and ways in which service design can be applied to promote this in different contexts.

Choosing to explore this in my dissertation was a first but crucial step that helped shape my thinking around sustainability in designing systems. I chose to focus on the circular economy and the role of service design in building one. Building on existing literature around consumer behaviour and business supply chains, I conducted primary research and also drew from my own practice as a service designer. The dissertation, which has now been awarded a distinction, proposes the use of service design principles, tools and processes in achieving circularity.

Writing my dissertation was a starting point in exploring fundamental questions around collective vs individualised responsibility towards the climate crisis. Since then, I’ve worked on many projects that have helped me look at sustainability through different lenses. I’ve been able to engage with sustainability through projects in policy and governance, user experience design and B2B services. For example, I recently worked on a project that enabled councils in the local government to share best practices with respect to the delivery of electric vehicle charging infrastructure in the UK's transition to a carbon neutral future. Another project I worked on was to design meaningful customer experiences for the regeneration-centred B Corp Vivobarefoot.

To deepen my understanding of sustainability in systems design, I’ve been working on a self-guided project along with my colleague Anchit Som, for the last 6 months. What started as an exploratory side project has now been shortlisted for the Terra Carta Design Lab and received a small amount of funding and interest from major companies and investors.

Our project inC2 is a B2B service that enables large companies to decarbonise their supply chains through supplier engagement and incentive models. We are currently working on building its Minimum Viable Product. This project has been pivotal in furthering our knowledge about carbon neutrality and the climate crisis. By reducing supply chain emissions, businesses will be able to build more resilient supplier networks and won’t have to pay for costly carbon offsets ever again. We believe that our product has the potential to remove over 11 mega tonnes of carbon emissions from the atmosphere per year.

As the climate crisis calls for urgency in our actions and behaviour, it is an exciting time for businesses to rethink business models and challenge what we call business as usual.

Through my practice, I wish to continue to explore and expand the intersections of service design, sustainability and human-centred design.

Launch Project

Context Video

Bijli Explainer

Bijli is a subscription marketplace that leverages Energy Efficiency as a Service and an experiment-based approach to deliver energy savings & sustainability for small-medium sized businesses. Bijli works on a pay for performance basis helping businesses benefit from energy cost savings without having to bear the high upfront cost and risks of equipment purchase. With our on-demand sensors and vendor marketplace, business owners are empowered to experiment and find their own unique ways to make their operations more efficient.

In Collaboration with:

Anchit Som

inC2- Tackling hidden supply chain emissions, media item 1

Launch Project

inC2- Tackling hidden supply chain emissions, media item 2

inC2- Tackling hidden supply chain emissions, media item 3

inC2 Explainer

inC2 is the world’s first supplier engagement platform that helps suppliers & procurement teams factor carbon footprint in their business decision-making allowing companies to go net zero.

Startup, looking for funding.

In Collaboration with:

Anchit Som

business decarbonisation software Supply Chain Sustainability

Disha Mittal

In Collaboration with:

In Collaboration with:

Social

About

Royal College of Art