Vridhi Agarwala

An ‘Interdisciplinary problem solver’. Vridhi is an Indian Service and Business Designer based in London. She’s passionate about transforming how organisations operate and innovate using behaviour and systems change through a research informed approach. Although she can be a pivotal asset in each step of the design process, her interests and skills stand out the most within the define and delivery phases.

Prior to her postgraduate studies, she obtained a Bachelor in Business Administration with a major in Finance. Her passion then made her explore the world of construction with a Postgraduate Diploma in Interior Design, where she discovered design thinking. Being a ‘curious problem solver’, she noticed the systemic gaps and issues in the construction industry which bought her to RCA’s service design program.

Her curiosity led to her dissertation on ‘systematizing corruption in Indian construction industry’ which was awarded with a distinction. Using a service design mindset, she explored the question of how corruption could be limited amongst young professionals in the industry and identified gaps for intervention. She then took some of this understanding forward to design experiments that could change relationships between a few stakeholders in the industry, helping them better understand each other via redesigned conversations. These were launched as ‘The Snug Experiment’ at London Design Festival in 2021.

Vridhi is currently working as a Service Designer at Darington Service Design Lab, where she is heavily involved in integrating service design with systems thinking and evaluation. Her work ranges from building an internal systems thinking learning platform to service improvement for young people in high violence areas. She additionally holds professional experience in project management, Foresight research, business development, design consultancy, and more. Most recently, she won Imperial MBA’s Deep Tech Challenge, 2021. Her work with NHS Blood and transplant (as featured here), has received great response and is currently being piloted in their Cambridge estate.

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.

A significant amount of responsibility falls 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 relationship 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.

Through ethnography (London and South East England centres), we learned how the environmental, estate team and occupiers engaged with the space, communicated with each other. 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.We were able to uncover three key insights, that lead to 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 adaption and engagement needs for sustainability initiatives for the different personas. It helped us formulate our problem statement and How Might We….

To make sustainability happen, requires making it tangible and relatable for the people in an 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 touch-points, that could help change behaviours, and therefore the culture toward sustainability. We identified estates teams as our entry point given their drive to improve the workplace culture.

Soft Systems: Sustainability in NHS Blood and Transplant, media item 7

We picked behaviour science concepts of nudging and priming which can help steer positive behaviours in a passive way. We choose signage as way to nudge behaviours and make sustainability tangible. We realised that NHSBT estates function with signs since they help occupiers navigate the space, by providing rules of how to behave, to perform a particular action, and for safety. We used the EAST framework to make our prototypes easy, attractive, social and timely.

Due to the red tape of rigorous testing at NHSBT, We initially tested at RCA, which faced similar barriers with occupier behaviour and engagement. We learnt 1. Insights into how occupiers respond and react to different shapes, colours and signs 2. Signage needed to be created by and given meaning by occupiers. This could change behaviours and nurture a sustainable culture over time. After testing a collaborative process in RCA, estates reported that signs had improved occupier behaviour.

Communication and engagement was an issue we had found, we tested a variety of touchpoints but found a low response rate. We then revisited ozur 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. Through 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 objectives as shown above are setting realistic metrics.

Some highlights are: 1. Participants being receptive to the workshop activities for personas. What helped is occupiers could relate and identify the personas within their estate. 2. Participants were receptive to the prototype insights shared and creatively used it in their signage. One said * "The weird-looking googly eyes will make people talk to each other" Aim for the service is to be rolled out in NHSBT estates across England.

People often make decisions against their own best interests. This is particularly evident in the way they manage their money. About 30% of British people have no more than 1000 pounds in savings, and 4 million have no savings at all and therefore no chance to react to unexpected costs. We partnered with EY Seren and explored the brief set for us: How can we shift the mindset and behaviours of people to drive better financial decisions that ensure life-long financial safety and stability?

Discover – Our team, dived deep into behavioural factors that impend people from making good decisions about their money, saving their income or moving up the financial ladder.The process involved exploring factors that formed and impacted people's current relationship with money and their approach to managing their finances. Our team also became mindful of our own relationships with and perceptions of money in the process to surface assumptions and insights, in addition to those from our research Participants.

Our target audience primarily involved Gen-z. Our key insights were: 1. Unexpected costs are a major barrier to savings. 2.Gen-Z, don't believe in pensions and desire higher returns. However, there is a desire to save, with many looking to their first jobs to start saving. 3. Amongst the people who do not save money or struggle to save, we found two behaviours 3. 1 People who recognised their struggle to save 3. 2 People who recognised that they did not save very well but did not recognise the struggle

With these insights we created Findi. Findi is a 1-year long employee benefit cum financial service that helps young people to start saving money at a pivotal moment in their lives, i.e. when they start working. It aims to help build healthy savings behaviours that can become the backbone of a healthy financial life. Our service helps people who start saving for emergencies through a mix of automated savings and targeted intervention of money use.

Findi creates an emergency savings account from income. Findi's default preferences redirects 20% of monthly salary into the emergency saving account and auto budgets the rest 80% for use. Emergency Savings here is the money that is supposed to be used for unexpected expenses that might be incurred in cases of emergencies. For eg. a car breaks down, a job loss etc. Since Findi focuses on creating a pool for emergencies, its architecture has been designed around the use of that money.

For behaviour change, self-reflection is a crucial. Findi enables this 4 feedback mechanisms: 1. Notifications: signal of warning before going over budget. 2. Review and analysis page: helps users reflect on what expenses could be avoided and identify emotions that might be linked to them. 3. Behaviour change graph is a motivator/ warning signal by showing how one's spending/saving is are changing over time. 4. Level of security bar: Long term financial roadmap to encourages progress and consistency.

We found out through light touch prototyping that if our service was to be used at all, the employer was the most trusted source to provide it. Hence, our ideal business plan is to provide this service as an employee benefits scheme to companies who will provide it for free to their new 1st time employees. In exchange for the service fee, we will provide companies with performance measurement reports, to show real impact and, where possible, insights that can help them take better care of their employees.

Behaviour Change Financial Service

Dissertation: Systematising corruption in Indian construction, media item 1

This research was inspired from my experience of playing different roles in the Indian construction industry and coming across unsettling bad-practices and gaps that needed to be filled.

ABSTRACT

This paper studies ‘Corruption in the context of the Indian construction industry’. It uses a service design mindset to analyze the problem from a systemic view. For this a series of confidential interviews centred around ethics, with national and international industry experts, students and construction-professionals, journalistic reports against bad practices and articles calling out for change are used, to locate pain points and gaps within this wicked problem. The problem as defined is: the burgeoning of corruption amongst young professionals in the industry due to an inability to identify systemic flaws which in turn bars them from breaking out. The hypothesis proposed is: the possibility of delegating part of the responsibility of limiting the future of corruption to educational institutions. To get to this, first corruption is explored through multiple lenses of business, economy, psychology and more and then narrows its focus down on education through exploring a sub-system between educational institutes-judiciary councils- market norms. This paper does not propose any solutions to the problem of corruption, rather provocates the reader throughout using many critical investigations. The aim of these provocations is for the reader to imagine a future generation that limits the survival of corruption.

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KEYWORDS Corruption, Construction, Education, System, Service-Design

Architecture construction CORRUPTION Design Research Education Interior Design Research Service Design system design

Vridhi Agarwala

ABSTRACT

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Royal College of Art