Linda S Mutunga

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About

Born in Nairobi, Kenya, Linda considers herself a global citizen of the world, having lived and worked across many countries and regions. She works across various fields and disciplines in the EMEA region.

Linda won a BBC journalism award in 2009, consequently working to bring BBC Introducing to life, co-creating with various artists such as Ed Sheeran and Supergrass.

Linda graduated in Fashion Design at Northumbria University and later set up a socially conscious design company, which recruited under-represented and unemployed women in the UK. The company was nominated for two awards, including a young director award by the Institute of Directors (IoD) and sold across the EMEA region, notably in Mayfair, London and Rome, Italy. A sister company, a social enterprise – aimed at empowering women in the sub-Saharan continent, was launched thereafter and debuted in Brooklyn, NYC, with tech Swedish start-up Tictail (Now Shopify). Since then, she has worked as a consultant helping technology, research firms and brands understand the needs of consumers across the EMEA region. She has also completed an MSc in Computer Science from Stockholm Universiteit, where she specialised in Decision Sciences, Risk and Cyberpsychology.

During her time at the RCA, she undertook a traineeship at the Dartington Service Design Lab, working on projects aimed at improving children's and young people's lives. In addition to supporting the Head of Service Design, Clive Grinyer and DR.Nicolás Rebolledo in delivering RCA Service Design Masterclasses to its external clientele. Linda also created a series of exploration courses on facilitation for the college-wide programme Across RCA.

Linda Mutunga also collaborated with the RCA Fashion department in the project METAHUMANS with epic games producing a monologue between selves.

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Statement

Hello!

I am Linda, a human, do-er and Service Designer

We are engaging in much deeper dialogue than ever before, asking fundamental questions about what it means to be human, and what we value, care for and nurture as we seek to engage and exist in more meaningful and intentional ways. Before arriving at the RCA, I became increasingly aware of design as an embedded and nuanced reality, with invisible mechanisms and systems that work to create opportunity, adversity, and other issues. I realised that design is permanently inscribed, with meanings and values, and often tackled with solution-based approaches, which means that occurrences, events and consequences are often unforeseen. It is for this reason and the need for a more human-centric and empathetic approach to problem-solving and design, I sought to study Service Design at the RCA to learn how we could tackle these societal challenges better. I bring experience from the media, commerce and technology and was awarded the Tim Brown (IDEO) Scholarship in 2020.

The journey so far, especially during a global pandemic, has been transformational. I am glad to have grown as a service designer and began to explore iterative and discursive processes to guide the design practice; I have found that for design to be truly transformative, care and intentionality are required, and it needs to start with people, be inclusive, collaborative, and holistic to address the issues impacting different communities in the UK and abroad. Critical values for my practice are intentionality, sustainability, community, and ecology. Practices that I enjoy are research, facilitation and prototyping.

Adidas Xuntos

Adidas Xuntos — Adidas Xuntos is a global platform that enables artisans and small business owners to become certified “Adidas Repair specialists”, both offline and online. It aims to reduce carbon emissions and grow sustainability and circularity holistically. While also helping Adidas create new revenue models that work in tandem with achieving these aims and improving the planet. Adidas Xuntos embraces eco-literate design and will resonate deeply with consumers wanting to support brands that share their values.
Blah Blah Blah — Blah blah blah, the famous words delivered by Greta Thunberg during her keynote speech at COP26: “Words that sound great but so far have not led to action. Build back better. Blah, blah, blah.”
Customer Understanding
Customer Understanding — The project began with primary and secondary research to understand Adidas, sustainability and consumer perception of Sustainability. The research also began to create personas based on purchasing and sustainability habits. While some preferred sustainability, others preferred to keep up with seasonal trends. However, some issues seemed to be universal and impacted purchasing behaviour and brand perception; consumers felt brands lacked awareness, consideration, and intent for the environment.
Understanding Operations
Understanding Operations — The research project went on to look at the Adidas manufacturing process, Own the Game Strategy and other business operations. It discovered that Adidas's current sustainability aims were not meeting sustainability objectives. Instead, some areas were contradictory to sustainability and circularity.
Service Proposition
Service Proposition — Adidas Feedback: The findings and project idea received critical and valuable feedback and need for further investigation and reflection, especially on return on investment (ROI). Key questions included what do brands get in return for their efforts in the scheme, and what would this mean for current business practices and processes? Moreover, what new methods, policies and legal frameworks would be required, and at what cost? All valuable feedback for critical, discursive, and intellectual exploration.

Blah blah blah, the famous words delivered by Greta Thunberg during her keynote speech at COP26:

“Words that sound great but so far have not led to action. Build back better. Blah, blah, blah.”

Greta was not wrong, and growing pressure from humans and the environment are all pushing for meaningful change.

Data shows that progress has slowed down. While waste generated per inhabitant is rapidly increasing, according to the European Environment Agency, we would require a faster rate of progress to achieve a truly circular economy. Moreover, we are embedded with non-human nature and dependent on these ecological systems, yet our basic understanding is deeply fragmented and erupt.

The challenge for Adidas is how to deliver a circular experience by 2025, that is authentic, credible and inclusive in supporting athletes' goals and needs. Adidas has acknowledged that they may have to re-imagine their entire product cycle and engage with consumers and athletes to achieve this goal- they are using three pillars credibility, experience and sustainability.

Medium: Project

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In Collaboration with:

Soft Systems (NHS Blood and Transpant )

Discovery – The UK government has set a target to reach net-zero by 2050, which will require large-scale transitions by companies and businesses in the UK and Major infrastructure decisions to implement these changes. NHSBT aims to go Net-zero by 2040. Responsible for this are NHSBT’s Environmental team, who are responding by transforming how their estates and operations are run.
Why Us-A significant amount of responsibility falls on NHSBT estate teams, who work on supporting the transition of their estates to ‘net-zero’ through energy reduction. Sustaining their net-zero efforts will require occupier behaviour and culture change. Embedding a culture of sustainability within the organisation is a pending challenge. This is where our research and involvement with NHSBT began.
Our research began with understanding the work dynamics and operations of NHSBT. We explored the roles and relationships between the estates and the environmental team. We found that sustainability within the NHSBT was defined as living within the natural limits of the planet. While we understood it to be broader, involving socio-economic and ecological factors.
Ethnography of London and SouthEast England centres enabled us to learn how the environmental, estate teams and occupiers engaged with space and communicated together. Further Workshops and interviews helped us test our hypothesis, identify key insights, and uncover critical issues that limited or would limit the success of sustainability incentives. Three key insights revealed organisational challenges and underlining issues, which limited engagement with sustainability.
We created personas that reflected the different working styles of NHSBT staff. We mapped our personas based on whether they were process-driven, creative, proactive, or reactive. Doing this helped us to learn what engagement activities and sustainability initiatives would suit different personas and support the adaptation of sustainability. This supported formulation of our problem statement and How Might We….
Develop (Strategy Plan) – To make sustainability happen, requires making it tangible and relatable for the people in the organisation. Therefore, our strategic approach to the problem was to explore behavioural and cultural elements of the organisation and engage with the people. This helped us identify key touchpoints, that could help change behaviours, and the culture toward sustainability within estates. We identified estates teams as our entry point, given their drive to improve the workplace culture.
We picked behaviour science concepts of nudging and priming which can help passively steer positive behaviours. We choose signage to nudge behaviours and make sustainability tangible in space engaged by occupiers. We realised that NHSBT estates function with signs since they help occupiers navigate the space by providing rules of how to behave, perform a particular action, and for safety. We used the EAST framework to make our prototypes easy, attractive, social and timely.
Due to NHSBT's highly sensitive working environment, and red tape, we conducted initial prototyping in the RCA, which faced similar barriers with occupier behaviour and engagement. Key learnings were for signage to be functional; it needed to be created by occupiers and given meaning by them to enable adaptation and nurture sustainable behaviour culture over time. Secondly, semiotics and colour played a role in influencing behaviours. Our collaborative process also improved occupier behaviour in RCA.
Communication and engagement was an issue we had found, we tested a variety of touchpoints but found a low response rate. We then revisited our insights and observations and realised that continuous face-to-face interactions had been the key engagement method- that helped built trust and relationships, and was fundamental to collaboration which is necessary for Sustainability to be tangible and accessible, we also found this to be true in the RCA.
We used the NBS framework to explore task-based solutions based on our persona's intrinsic and extrinsic work motivations. Using the framework for our sustainability personas, we realised this was also a process that needed to be owned and co-created by NHSBT occupiers.
Estate teams and occupiers are taken on a process of co-creation that makes sustainability relevant and relatable to occupiers and empowers estates to take ownership of the pilot. Occupiers design signage based on pain points identified by estate teams to nudge sustainable behaviours. These are co-created and placed according to how occupiers use and navigate their spaces.
We help estate teams tailor their communications and recognition efforts based on sustainability-focused personas to support engagement with the initiative. We deliver additional tangible or digital assets that can help them reflect, support and monitor progress. The service ends with supporting estates in formalising procedures so sustainability efforts can continue to grow. We are currently addressing and testing in NHSBT Cambridge. One objective, as shown above, is setting realistic metrics.
We are currently piloting our service proposition with NHSBT. Some highlights are Participants being receptive to the workshop activities for personas. What helped is occupiers could relate to and identify the personas within their estate. 2. Participants were receptive to shared prototype insights and creatively used them to tackle estate pain points. One said * "The weird-looking googly eyes will make people talk to each other" Aim of the service is to be rolled out in NHSBT estates across England.

NHS Blood and Transplant helps people do something extraordinary - donate blood, organs, tissues or stem cells to save someone in need.

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In Collaboration with:

  • Vridhi Agarwala
    An ‘Interdisciplinary problem solver’. Vridhi is an Indian Service Designer and Design Strategist based in London. She’s passionate about systems thinking, business model innovation, process design, and taking a research-informed approach.
  • Soft Systems
    Soft Systems is co-founded by Vridhi Agarwala and Linda Mutunga

Gerunds Mean Nothing: How to be an ethical Service Designer

Gerunds Mean Nothing: How to be an ethical Service Designer
Gerunds Mean Nothing: How to be an ethical Service Designer — Extract-Creativity is not objective and is not restrained by abilities; one selects what to do.

'Gerunds Mean Nothing' explores how Service Designers can be ethical before beginning the design process. It explores how designers can prepare themselves prior to employment from a western philosophical perspective; this is followed by an investigation of the anthropology practice and the impact when used by Service Designers without the proper understanding of the tools. The final section presents how using these tools impacts the world and society and why Service Designers must consider their practice from multiple ethical perspectives before beginning the design process.

(Distinction)

Supervision: Kevin Biderman

Feedback: Shehnaz Suterwalla

META HUMANS

State 1- Exploring the multitude of oneself- one's dialogue in the intersection of the physical, mental, and other dimensional worlds.

The output was a collection of metahumans exploring all aspects of the realms of humanity, being human, self and self(s). A project that connects us all, weaving all human experiences, and bringing to the fore our vulnerabilities fears and realities.

Special thanks to Zowie Broach, Philip Delamore, Savithri Bartlett, Tristan Webber, Sam Chester, Matteo Montecchi and all my peers.

Forgetting:

Stage 1- Exploring the multitude of oneself- one's dialogue in the intersection of the physical, mental, and other dimensional worlds. 

Stage 2- Where one reinvents themselves many times over and can be a vessel of many truths.

State 3- Final Output- META HUMANs explore the limitations of cognitive ability: forgetting, neurodiversity, ageing and being human. 

Medium: Digital

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