My diploma is about sneakers and sustainability. Sustainability in the clothing and apparel industry is something I’ve been interested in for a long time. I chose to work with sneakers mainly because I saw that many have done service design projects on clothes and sustainability before but of all I have read I haven’t seen many projects that deal with the shoe part of that industry, especially not the sneakers and how we may consume them in a more sustainable way. I began preparing for my diploma by attending shoe making classes in Chile two years ago. I enrolled in a semester-long master’s program in product design where I focused on how to design a as sustainable sneaker as possible. In the summer, I worked closely with Repairable, a start-up specializing in clothing repair. Through mapping out their services and redesigning their website, I received an insider’s view on the repair culture in Oslo and gained some valuable contacts. I chose to focus on service design for my diploma thesis because I enjoyed working with the methods I learned during the service design semesters at AHO. I wanted to show how I personally use service design methodologies in my own work as I dedicate a full semester to a service design project for the first time. I’ve known for a while before I started that I wanted to pursue service design. I believe in prototyping services quickly and pushing my work outside the classroom as much as possible. I also wanted to create as many sketches and prototypes as I could, knowing that they wouldn’t be perfect and polished, but could offer me insight. This is because I believe that we can never know how our designs will work before we test it out in context with real, non-biased users.