StegForSteg is a multidisciplinary group project conducted in collaboration with Ski World Championship Trondheim 2025. The project was carried out as part of the course 'Experts in Teams - Design for Inclusion: Co-creation and Volunteering against Youth Marginalization'.
Research from Statistics Norway reveals that about 10% of young people (ages 18-30) are disengaged from work or education as of Q4 2022. With the Ski World Championship 2025 coming in hot, the Trondheim municipality and the Ski Championships committee aim to address this issue by using volunteer opportunities to reintegrate marginalized youth.
However, they face a challenge: the number of applicants from these backgrounds are lower than they had hoped for. Recent studies also suggest that today's youth are less inclined to volunteer compared to previous generations.
Our project goal was to understand why and to explore strategies to recruit more volunteers for the Ski World Championship to combat youth exclusion.
To dive deeper into the heart of this issue, we decided to conduct interviews as our research. Though, due to the sensitive nature of our intended target group, we couldn’t interview any individuals with these backgrounds, so we went for the next best option, the people that work the closest with them: NAV Trondheim.
After several sessions of interviews, we have concluded that one of the main issues lies in that one of the reason the youth are less inclined to seek out volunteer opportunities because they, in comparison to earlier generations, do not see the value of volunteer work.
In other words, when they ask “What’s in it for me?” about a volunteering opportunity, they couldn’t get a clear answer to justify applying for the position.
With this discovery, we have, together with our stakeholders, narrowed in on a problem statement:
“How can the Ski World Championships convey, concretize, and highlight the value of volunteer work as a first step towards paid employment for marginalized youth?”
Through workshopping with the other team members, we have developed a persona that we think represents our target user base. Introducing:
After plenty of workshopping and discussions, we have drafted a 3 steps concept to correspondence to the problem statement:
Here is a Storyboard based on the persona we created and a Mockup of the application portal to illustrate the user journey.
This had been a fun yet challenging project to work on, but we are very proud of the solution we have drafted. It had been an absolute delight to work with the Ski Championship and Trondheim municipality to solve such a complex problem.
The Ski Championship had partially adopted our solution, especially the certificate. We are excited to see whether our solution will have a positive impact on the event.