Yizhou Yang

With a bachelor degree in industrial design, I had several internships to explore different design areas.

In a social innovation design project, I worked with Tsinghua University CIDIH and generated a proposal for Chengdu Government, in order to enhance the influence of Chengdu culture and attract the youth from other cities. And I once worked as a UX designer for a start-up company which built a platform to promote a digital innovation in study. I also played the role as a product designer to propose a new retail logistics system for a unicorn company implementing robots.

Among all these areas, service design is where I have the most passion and want to study further. I love probing into human behaviours, thus, I enjoy its focus on human beings and the research part of service design projects. Moreover, I believe service is the most powerful tool for wicked problems.

For a long time, I have been wondering where my empty beauty bottles should go. They are made of really nice plastic or glass, but they’re too complex to enter the municipal recycling system. Every time I dumped a beauty container into a rubbish bin, I felt guilty. And I knew I’m not the only one that felt this struggle.

Getting to know the recycling campaign of L'Oréal in such a situation, I decided to break the barrier between beauty companies’ input and customers’ awareness. The To-Morrow Plan aims to provide better communication, which will allow companies and customers to work together and contribute to a more sustainable consumption environment.

Building a more sustainable beauty culture — The global beauty and personal care industry are worth more than 532 million US dollars today. While building great fantasies for beauty customers around the world, the huge industry is causing massive air, ocean, and soil pollution on the earth. In this project, we are collaborating with the industrial leader L’Oréal China to raise inspiration on how sustainability can be more effectively achieved in Chinese beauty market.

Today’s VICIOUS circle of beauty sustainability — Generating from the real voices of beauty customers, beauty companies, and third-party support organizations, we discovered a vicious circle for today’s Chinese beauty sustainability situation. Consumers do not pay attention to sustainability; therefore, this factor is less critical and competitive in the market. This makes the beauty companies have less motivation to emphasize on beauty sustainability, and shrinks the chance for consumers to touch on and get knowledge about this topic. So eventually, the s

The promotion of the To-Morrow Plan — The service of To-Morrow Plan comes first with a comprehensive promotion design for establishing compelling company attitudes and outputting incentives from company's side. First of all, a big shout-out is made to loudly present that 25 brands under L’Oréal China unite together to raise a beauty sustainability revolution. Then, advertising will launch on multiple channels. Lastly, selecting one product from each brand, our service upgrades a new fully biodegradable packaging for them.

The To-Morrow APP — The To-Morrow Plan also includes an App to implement participation incentives, transparent information and customized guidelines for L’Oréal's customers. Firstly, the APP provides a discount voucher for new users to attract sign-ups. There are 3 main features: AR scanning, product record and credit collection. Through the AR, users can scan a L’Oréal product to see its sustainability performance. In records, customized guidelines are offered to end a product properly. Unsuitable products will also be marked

To-Morrow Vision: the VIRTUOUS circle that we are building — The To-Morrow Plan first establishes a compelling company attitude through promotions to raise awareness on beauty sustainability. It also provides comprehensive incentives to boost customers’ interests to participate and contribute. Then, by implementing transparent information throughout customers’ entire consumption journeys, the service levels up their understanding about the subject. Lastly, with the customized and simplified guidance, customers can now contribute in the most comfortable way.

The To-Morrow Plan in the real world — 3 workshops with 16 target consumers provided feedback on several aspects, including incentive plans, rewarding design, waste reduction and so forth. Prototypes with L'Oréal and other stakeholders, like Terracycle and convenience stores, also brought suggestions. The validation shows that L'Oréal will benefit from the project. This isn’t a profitable plan, but it can keep running under a controlled input. The To-Morrow Plan will keep customers more loyal to bring more income.

Following L’Oréal Group’s sustainability commitment, the To-Morrow plan proposes an end to end sustainable beauty consumption experience for L’Oréal’s customers in China, and eventually aims to empower a positive circle of sustainable beauty in Chinese market.

In Collaboration with:

Yiwen Qu

This is a team project with Yiwen Qu, MA Service Design

Yizhou Yang

In Collaboration with:

Social

About

Royal College of Art