- Year
- 2024
- Role
- Research and Service Design Lead
- Partner
- ISHO Furniture (Bangladesh)
- Location
- Boston, MA
About
A furniture subscription service that lets transient residents live well without owning, and gives a furniture brand a sustainable channel to keep its products in circulation.
Outcome
A research-led service concept: customers access quality furniture without buying it, and the provider turns seasonal furniture waste into a repurposing channel. The work delivered a validated concept, a full service blueprint, and an AI taste-matching flow across desktop and mobile, developed with sponsor ISHO Furniture. It was a research and service-design project, not a shipped product, and what it demonstrated was a model that fits transience instead of fighting it.
The Problem
Every late August, Boston stages a small disaster it has named: Allston Christmas. As leases turn over, students drag what they can't carry to the curb, and the sidewalks in Allston, which sits between BU, BC, and Harvard, fill with discarded furniture. The easy reading is a waste problem.
But the waste is a symptom. With 39% of Boston's residents between 18 and 34 (a 2019 City of Boston report puts that 18 points above the national average), the city runs on people who move constantly. The real problem isn't that they're wasteful; it's that ownership doesn't fit a transient life. Buying furniture asks people to commit to a place and a future they don't have yet, so they buy cheap, use it briefly, and leave it on the curb. The convention is broken, not the person.
Research
To understand the ecosystem rather than assume it, I led five in-depth interviews with students across the city: three new arrivals and two who had moved several times within Boston, documented with recordings, notes, and stimulus exercises. Two tools did the heavy lifting: a Think-Out-Loud floor-plan exercise, where participants sketched and narrated their spaces, and A Day in the Life, which traced how they actually used their furniture.
The conversations kept returning to instability, not taste.
"(If I am) financially stable and settle in one place, I will definitely buy better furniture."
Participant 01
"I don't know about next year because it really depends on my job situation."
Participant 02
People weren't avoiding good furniture; they were avoiding a commitment they couldn't justify. A Day in the Life surfaced the same thing physically: residents eating meals in bed because a dining table wasn't worth the space or the spend. The pivot was clear: design for impermanence, not against it.
Design
From the research I developed three directions, then pressure-tested each against feasibility and the waste it had to solve.
- A subscription furniture model. Rent with flexible terms; return or buy out at the end. It removes the upfront cost and the commitment.
- A personalized rental service. Renters, apartments, and providers connected, so residents pick pieces that fit them and landlords gain retention.
- A convertible bed-and-dining-table. A product answer to the "eating in bed" finding, reclaiming square footage in small apartments.
I carried the subscription model forward. It gave the provider real operational control, opened a market conventional furniture businesses had left untouched, and turned seasonal waste into inventory to repurpose rather than a cost to absorb.
To explore positioning before committing, I built three imaginative furniture brands, each aimed at a different segment from secondary research on the Boston market. Those explorations mapped the touchpoints and service moments that shaped the final concept, which I then developed with the sponsor, ISHO Furniture (Bangladesh), drawing a palette and moodboard from their existing lines so the service read as an extension of their brand, not a bolt-on.
The Service
The final concept is a subscription that trades ownership for access: quality furniture without the commitment, and for the provider, a sustainable way to keep furniture in circulation.
A blueprint, not just screens. I mapped the full customer journey end to end, including the interactions and the logistics layers behind them, so the concept held up as an operation, not only an interface.
Choosing furniture by taste, not by SKU. First-time movers told us the hardest part wasn't only budget; it was not knowing what they wanted or how to make a space cohere. So the service starts from aspiration: customers pick inspiration images, the system learns their aesthetic and generates mood-based scenes, then matches real pieces from ISHO's inventory to those scenes. It inverts the usual shopping flow: discover the taste first, find the products second.
Set up on desktop, live with it on mobile. The desktop flow handles setup and activation; the mobile app carries the ongoing relationship: monthly feedback to keep the fit right, full-purchase options, and subscription and maintenance management. An expiring plan nudges toward purchase, closing the loop from access to ownership for the pieces people grow attached to.
Role
I led the project end to end: planning and running the research, conducting and analyzing the interviews, managing the research team, developing the service concepts, building the service blueprint, and designing the desktop and mobile interfaces, through to the final concept developed with the sponsor.
Learnings
Reframing the convention was the whole job. The brief looked like a waste problem; the leverage was in ownership itself. Once I stopped designing against transience and started designing for it, the service almost defined itself.
Action clarified more than analysis. For the final presentation, we staged the service as a short skit. Acting it out exposed flaws and gaps between screens that had stayed invisible on the board: the kind of thing you only catch by doing, not diagramming. It's the lesson I carry forward: design is action, experimentation, and iteration, and the fastest way to find the real problem is to try the thing.
