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Designing self-care for transient youth

Designing self-care for transient youth

Spontanea intervenes on planning fatigue and newcomer isolation by turning familiar hobbies into spontaneous, proximate, peer‑led self‑care rituals for transient youth in Milan.

PROBLEM BRIEF BY

Philips

INDUSTRY

Social Innovation

TEAM

Service Design Challenge Finalist

Overview

We designed Spontanea as part of the Student Service Design Challenge 2025, participating specifically in response to the brief provided by Philips: Expanding self-confidence horizons. Our approach to self-care was making it accessible to everyone, something that is not restricted to those who can afford to pay a hefty price for it. Based out of Milan, we chose to specifically design for transient youth, as every year, thousands of people move into and out of Milan

Our Proposal

Spontanea helps transient youth build self-care habits through spontaneous meetups, exploring local activities, connecting with neighbors, and gaining confidence in a new city. Powered by events hosted by local businesses and other young people in the city, it takes the pressure off planning or hosting, making self-care fun and surprising even when life is in motion.

The video we used for the submission of our proposal - Spontanea

The Team

Team Pulse was a mix of students from around the world, brought together at Politecnico di Milano for the MSc in Product Service System Design. We divided tasks based on our strengths and curiosities, and I took the lead on documenting service maps and designing the digital touchpoint, a mobile app that brought our project to life. Along the way, I also contributed across all phases, learning by doing and growing with the team.

Choosing the target population

We found out that in 2018, the Lombardia region saw mobility with 303K registrations and 280K deregistrations. This net balance highlighted a broader failure in Lombardy, and specifically Milan’s ability to support the long-term well-being of its youth. And while talking to the people living in Milan, we understood that people tend to treat Milan as a launch pad into Northern Europe, where the average salaries are higher than in the South. 

For young Italians, it’s like a city where they can find a lot of work opportunities as compared to other cities in the country, and for internationals, living here is comparatively cheaper than other major cities in Europe, so it acts as a good entry point for them to the continent.

Milan as a launch pad

Faced with a competitive and fast-paced environment, many youngsters often prioritize their professional goals over their well-being, as they are in Milan to boost their professional life. This group frequently encounters cultural clashes, complex legal procedures, challenges in finding housing, financial and professional uncertainty, and feelings of isolation, worsened by the rise of remote work and the normalization of individualistic practices.

So, that's how we defined transient youth - Young people who are temporarily living in a place without having a stable residence, in order to find work opportunities or pursue education.

Primary Research

The goal was to understand how living in Milan affects self-care practices among transient youth, why some stay while others leave sooner, and how existing communities emerge, sustain, and create value for members. Participants included international and domestic migrants currently in Milan and those who left, plus community members and leaders who could speak to how group rituals and spaces hold people together.

Choosing the participants

Eight participants represented varied timelines, motivations, and comfort with local language and systems, allowing comparison between fleeting, orbiting, and embedded experiences of the city. Stories were constructed from interviews to illustrate how capabilities from one’s past life can catalyze proximity, confidence, and community in Milan. We interviewed -

4

People who had already left Milan, after staying here for 2 to 4 years

2

People who chose to stay in Milan after their higher education

2

Leaders who were building communities in Milan

Methodology

A qualitative approach combined semi-structured interviews, generative tools, and user diaries to surface routines, frictions, and enabling conditions for self-care in context. Our guiding questions were -

#1

What is the perception of living in Milan among transient youth?

#2

How has Milan impacted participants’ self-care practices, from individual routines to shared rituals in public spaces ?

To understand their perception, and help them in verbalizing their thoughts well, we showed them a bunch of pictures and made them pick one.

Research tool we used to understand perception

Clustering our findings

To understand themes coming out from our findings, we did an affinity mapping exercise together, coming our findings from Primary as well as secondary research.

Affinity Map with findings

Participant Stories

We curated some stories of the participants (not using their real names) to empathize more with their situation, that guided us throughout this project.

  • Julia: Physical activities and self-esteem

    Julia arrived from Chile to pursue her master's degree in Milan. From the very beginning, she faced a loss of self-esteem and well-being. Before coming to Italy, she was accustomed to exercising and maintaining a routine, but with so many overwhelming changes while starting a new life in Europe, she lost that habit and struggled with depression, which left her stagnant. It was at this moment that she realized she needed to find a solution.
    This is when she reconnected with her routines from Chile, with the hobby that had brought her well-being in her previous life, and used it as a source of motivation to join a CrossFit community in her neighborhood. She transformed an individual activity into the driving force to connect with her surroundings.
    She overcame her fear of speaking Italian and succeeded in connecting with people in her area through physical activity. Since then, she has nourished her self-esteem by strengthening these relationships. Now, she feels not only stronger in caring for her body, but also supported, with her self-esteem boosted by the proximity and connections she has formed. It is in these relationships that even spontaneous group activities now arise, which do not require exhausting planning.

  • Amit: When people don't find proximity

    Amit, on the other hand, remembers his time in Milan as an extremely fleeting period. He arrived with his girlfriend, and together, they shared most of their experiences in Italy. They met a couple of friends at the university they attended and only hung out with them a few days after classes.
    They went through a tough seasonal depression, which they tried to combat by doing yoga in-house, but they only found true enjoyment during their trips around the city, outside of the grey streets of Milan.


    Although they arrived with high expectations and a desire for change, they couldn’t channel that energy properly, and it turned into exhaustion and disappointment. Amit even mentions that if he had known from the start that he would be in the city for more than a year, he would have sought out communities or activities to connect more with the space through proximity. But at the moment he felt it wasn't worth it, since planning activities felt overwhelming.



  • Bernarda: When your perspective changes

    Bernarda arrived in Milan from a small town in Piedmont to study, full of expectations. However, from the very beginning, she felt completely overwhelmed by the city. She mentions that the city seemed massive due to the distance between her home and her new friends' places. She didn't know how to navigate it and felt deeply disconnected.


    After a few years, she found her first job. Now, as she manages her bills and uses public transportation, she feels that the city's vastness has shifted into a platform full of opportunities. Having now established her routines, she allows herself to explore the city, discovering and marveling at its diverse environments. Through this exploration, she feels the city has become her own. In the absence of planning her routes, Bernarda has found well-being that comes from serendipity.





Key Insights

Too much planning!?

When socializing demands too much planning, it becomes a burden; when it’s easy and spontaneous, the city starts to feel like home.

Familiarity acts as a catalyst

Familiar activities from the past boost confidence in new contexts, especially when practiced with a group.

Self care is a ME WE activity

Self-care is personal, but it becomes more meaningful with others through small, shared rituals that build belonging.

Sense of control

Embodied practices like walking, running, or cycling create a sense of control and re-ground people in unfamiliar settings.

Sense-making

We created diagrams based on our understanding, which helped us in figuring out the anchors on which we needed to focus on in order to actually create something that could help the transient youth of Milan.

The anchors

After diagramming and further discussions with the team, these were the key anchors we picked for our service system -

Hobby

Carrying a familiar practice to a new place; the skill is the bridge.

Proximity

Make self-care physically and emotionally close to reduce friction

Public spaces

Common place for small, repeating rituals that welcome newcomers.

Reframed Opportunity

How might we use the capacity of transient youth flowing into Milan to create an environment that enables the dynamic population of the city to uplift each other’s self-esteem through shared spontaneous embodied activities?

Ideation

Looking at global patterns and local precedents, the service was designed and then co-shaped with transient youth. We started looking at different case studies around the world, and ideated a service system with some offerings, which we later developed further during a co-design sessions with people from our target population.

Case studies around the world

Co-design sessions

Co-design sessions

The service - How it works

  • The users receive timely invitations through the Spontanea app to nearby embodied activities, based on their preferences and location. They can choose to attend the events - some of which are free and others are paid which could be accessed using credits offered through the app.

  • Users can turn into hosts to convert their routines into open invitations, earn credits and add people to their social network, leaving traces in their neighborhood.

  • Local businesses can list trial or paid micro-sessions, gaining pay-per-booking revenue and discovery among transient youth.

  • Municipalities get access to anonymized insights on care activities and public space use, aligning with neighborhood-level wellbeing goals.

Making it real: the system

To evolve the idea into a service system, we visualized how the service would actually look like by grounding it in Milan.

Value exchange map

Ecosystem relationships and flows between attendees, hosts, businesses, municipal actors, and data loops for value and money.

Service blueprint

Frontstage invitations, booking and credits, host enablement; backstage matching, moderation, analytics, and city feedback loops.

Mobile App

Onboarding users with their interests and thresholds, proximity and frequency controls, “emergency nudge” for activities and the neighborhood living map - all gets packed in a fun and youthful mobile app.

Notification for an activity

Here's the Figma file - Spontanea app design

Business Model

  • Value: Flexible, proximate, embodied activities for youth; trial-to-convert demand for businesses; credits and visibility for hosts; insights for municipalities.

  • Revenues: Credit bundles, per-attendee commissions, partner analytics, municipal dashboards and reports.

  • Costs and enablers: Peer and partner hosting reduce fixed costs; institutional onboarding lowers CAC; matching engine, credits, moderation, and analytics drive defensibility.

Business Model Canvas

My key learnings

  • Diagramming for sense-making was one of the most interesting things I learnt during this project. It not just helped me to understanding the relationship between different concepts, but also helped to align the team to focus on a common topic.

  • It was my first experience with developing a business model, which definitely helped me think from a business perspective in a holistic way.

CONTENT

Overview

Our Proposal

The Team

Users

Primary Research

Participant Stories

Insights

Sense-making

The Anchors

Opportunity

Ideation

The service

The System

My Learnings

FIN.

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© Shubham Ahuja 2025

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© Shubham Ahuja 2025

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© Shubham Ahuja 2025

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