Service Design

With the opportunity areas clearly defined, the process shifted from broad exploration to constructing more concrete concepts. Instead of generating more ideas, the focus now was on refining, combining, and selecting the most promising ideas or opportunities to move forward with from what had already emerged.

At this stage, three key questions guided the development of each concept:

What specific problem is this concept solving?

How does it work as a system, not just a feature?

What would make people adopt and trust this?

Structuring the Concepts

Rather than jumping to polished solutions, each concept was formulated by thinking through elements that would make it whole:

Core Idea – the central intervention.

Value Proposition – what are we offering to make the system better.

User Journey – how a vendor will navigate in the new system.

This helped develop a well thought out and structured concept rather than coming up with ideas and features.

Outcome of This Stage

The result of this phase is a set of early-stage concepts that are more cohesive than individual ideas but still open enough to evolve.

With a set of How Might We questions in place, we moved into concept generation. We began with a broad brainstorming session, intentionally keeping the space open to avoid locking into solutions too early.

This exercise helped us surface the overarching categories where most ideas naturally clustered. Across the board, ideas fell into a few recurring directions: awareness and assistance, instant or easier access to loans, repayment systems, and incentives to encourage continued engagement and repayment.

At this stage, we consciously stepped back to examine whether what we had generated were full ideas, individual features, or assumptions carried over from existing systems. This distinction became important—it helped us identify which directions had the potential to evolve into standalone concepts and which were better suited as supporting elements.

From there, we began refining and combining ideas, framing them into early concept directions rather than finished solutions. The focus remained on exploration: testing how different ideas might work together, what problems they addressed, and where they fell short.

Following fieldwork in both cities, we moved into a phase of synthesis and analysis. We revisited interviews with street vendors, bank officials, and urban local body (ULB) representatives, pulling out key quotes, recurring themes, and moments of friction.

This process helped surface not just what was said, but also what remained unsaid - patterns of dependency, trust, confusion, and workarounds that shaped how the scheme functioned on the ground.

This process helped us move into deriving insights by connecting patterns across interviews and contexts. These insights became the foundation for reframing the problem and guiding our next design decisions. From these insights, we moved into framing How Might We questions that helped us reframe the problem space and open up opportunities for exploration.

After weeks of immersion in Ahmedabad, we continued our study in Shillong. Shillong was a diiferent experience as there was a shift—not just geographically, but culturally and institutionally. The way things worked here was different from what we experienced in Ahmedabad. Due to this we were also able to see whether the patterns we were seeing were city-specific or systemic. One of the most significant differences in Shillong was the presence of a rigorous vendor identification and verification process. The municipality had previously conducted detailed street vendor surveys to formally identify vendors operating in the city. Through this process, vendors were issued Certificates of Vending, allowing them to officially recognise themselves as street vendors within the system. Another structural shift was the relocation of vendors from open streets into organised vending clusters such as the Muda Complex. While this relocation might seem as a step to being organised, ot came with its own set of challenges. The findings from our research in both the places made it clear that the scheme although beneficial to some, needs a lot of rework to be worth it for the vendors.

The Pradhan Mantri Street Vendor Atmanirbhar Nidhi (PM SVANidhi) is an initiative of the Govt. of India. It was introduced during COVID to help street vendors to access affordable working capital loan for resuming their livelihoods activities, after easing of lockdown.