In 30 seconds
- Challenge
- Young people in Chile want to buy clothes more sustainably but don’t know how, and the clothes they don’t use end up as waste.
- My part
- Research with young people, the service design, the app prototype and the brand, as a 12-week Master’s project.
- Result
- A service concept shaped with young people and a clickable app prototype. It wasn’t launched.
The problem
Young people in Chile want to buy clothes more sustainably, but don’t know how. Meanwhile the clothes they don’t use pile up at home, and too many end up as waste.
We set out to design a service that makes circular fashion the easy option, as part of the Master’s in Advanced Design at UC.
What we did
01
A problem that kept narrowing
We started with microplastics in the ocean. Following the problem, we landed on recycling, then on how people consume, and finally on clothing: one of the biggest sources of waste in the world, and in Chile you can see it from space, in the piles of used clothes in the Atacama desert.
The turn that mattered: for the people we talked to, recycling felt pointless, but they were eager to change how they buy.
02
Research in five layers
We combined five methods over May and June 2023, and closed with a co-creation workshop where 19 people aged 18 to 25 mapped what they feel before, during and after buying clothes.
- 8 h
- observation at recycling points
- 10 h
- netnography on news sites and social media
- 50
- survey answers
- 25
- interviews with users and fashion influencers
- 19
- people in the co-creation workshop
“I hate buying expensive clothes because they’re supposed to be better quality, but they look awful after the first wash.”
Woman, 23“Finding places to donate or recycle clothes is hard. Recycling, selling or repairing takes too much effort.”
Man, 26“If a piece I really like tears, I fix it with patches and embroidery.”
Woman, 20“I always prefer second-hand stores. I find cheaper, unique clothes.”
Man, 28
03
Three profiles
The research gave us three people with different levels of commitment: an activist who already buys second hand, a busy professional who wants it to be easy, and a student on a budget with a minimalist way of buying.
04
From the challenge to a service
VISTE.ME lets you buy, rent, sell and repair clothes inside your own community. You hand in the clothes you don’t use at a VISTE.ME point, where they get checked and cleaned, and you get VisteCoins to spend on someone else’s.
The flow follows two people: Molly, who has too many clothes and doesn’t know what to do with them, and Emma, who wants to dress more sustainably. It closes with what each purchase saved the planet.
How might we get young people to embrace circular fashion in the way they shop, instead of turning to fast fashion?
Scroll inside the flow, or tap to enlarge
05
The app
I designed and built the app prototype in Adobe XD: onboarding that learns your style from the music and characters you like, a store where every piece can be bought or rented, repair options and DIY tutorials.
Try the prototype
Tap through it right here: it’s the same Adobe XD prototype I used to test the flows.
Open it full screen ↗06
Identity
An identity for a generation that cares about style first: an iridescent gradient that changes with the light, like clothes, and a symbol of three arrows for the cycle of a garment.
What happened
VISTE.ME stayed a Master’s project: it wasn’t launched. What it shows is the full process, from reframing the problem to a service concept shaped with young people and a clickable app prototype.