Jeeyoung Sim

Hi, I'm Jeeyoung Sim, a service and product designer born in Seoul, South Korea.

Before coming to RCA, I completed my BA in Industrial Design at Rhode Island School of Design with a concentration in NCSS, Nature-Culture-Social-Sustainability Studies in the United States. Over the years at RISD, I shaped my focus on design to bring more values beyond the functionality and aesthetics of products. Then, I decided to attend RCA Service Design, willing to learn more about building user-centred experiences and narratives and curating supportive systems for products that could bring the means to values I was seeking.

Learning Service Design at RCA was a great decision to fulfil my curiosity and develop skills for user-centric design. I practice how the digital media and platform support the physicality to enrich the user experience and provide a service.

During RCA, I have been working on various projects impacting society diversely from the future of works of market traders, the guidance for the financial vulnerability and the consumer's after-purchase experience for sustainable fashion in collaboration with the partners such as Ernst & Young, Rainbird AI, Adidas and Su-Re.

Over the journey in RCA, I experienced the power of service design with its capabilities of solving social issues through a balance of physical and digital interactions within the community. Also, I enjoyed transforming the traditional business by converging the involved narratives and adopting new technologies.

And one of my biggest aspirations has been around sustainable fashion. With the influences from my background and my dear sister, a fashion designer, we often discuss the urgency of solving the wicked problems of the fashion industry. Then, the last project I did in RCA, the adidas NEXT, allowed me to imagine a circular and sustainable future for fashion. During the research, I was interested in the power dynamics between brands and consumers in developing the envisioned industry landscape and transforming it into co-effort interventions. Through the adidas NEXT project, my teammates and I created the service for suggesting choices to consumers loyal to the brand and looking for ways to do something other than disposing of their products. (*If you are curious about my previous project, adidas NEXT - check out my service design course page. adidas NEXT - RCA Service Design 2022 )

Inspired by the project, I wanted to raise the value of understanding the consumer's after-purchase information in creating a sustainable fashion. Through WOT, I aimed to evoke the conscious purchase minds of the consumers with their after-purchase experiences that are their past engagements with the products and hints or references for the future with the new ones.

a video summary of the service, WOT

potential network of WOT, showing the WOT's stakeholders

cover image / link to the preview of WOT

Launch Project

WOT preview link – This is a link to the preview of WOT. The link to the Service Design page is in the work description.

WOT, my final project, is an acronym for "Wear Over Two-Hundred Times." As revealed in the name, this digital service helps the fashion wanderers who want to build their styles by decreasing the chances of buying the products they are unlikely to wear and increasing their attachments to the products with an understanding of the products for long wear.

Starting with Patagonia's "Buy less, Wear longer", we have seen similar campaigns delivered by many sustainable brands. The slogan offers the simple fact that it is easy to follow and establish a sustainable way of living. However, we are surrounded by numerous external influences that trigger our desire to consume, including the marketing that constantly notifies us of the newly released items and promotions, fast cycles of trends by fast fashion, or the viral feeds of social media with howls and sponsorships. Moreover, as sustainable fashion becomes more aware by the consumers tempted to consume more sustainably and consciously, sustainable productions and products often become the trigger points for the consumers under those external influences - or even misused like the greenwashing for the profits.

Therefore, the consumers need to predict what they will wear much longer and more versatilely on their own before buying along with those external influences. The more concrete their standards are, the process of prediction can become more precise and uncomplicated. And through WOT, the consumers keep track of their products' after-purchase experiences based on their shared usage and feeling. With the mix of micro and macro goals - the daily missions & the seasonal challenges-, WOT supports the consumer’s interest and engagement with the service and the products. As the consumers achieve the given goals, they gradually know more about their possessions and actual preferences through the summaries and the activity logs. Furthermore, it creates the opportunity to give real-time feedback on the items to the small or local designers targetting the slow growth who lack the resources to gather the data and apply it to the products for improvements.

If you want to read more about this project, feel free to check out our service design website for more descriptions and the development process or my project site for more previews.

In Collaboration with:

Su-Re

Jeeyoung Sim

In Collaboration with:

Social

About

Royal College of Art