Shana Agid

Witnessing the speed of growth and reach in demand for service design (SD) confronts us to ask what neoliberal forces are behind this acceleration? Are services, systems and structures really improving at this velocity, and what are we eroding and ignoring in turn? Pausing to ask about the direction and effect of change is critical to recognising SD’s implication in the status quo. This paper presents a methodology of noticing precedents that are quotidian and dystopian to show how dominant logics of SD are commodifying social practices of relating and organising. By slowing down to attend, listen and reflect, our approaches reveal existing rituals, values, nuances and commitments that teach us what an apolitical SD fails to see. We contribute a methodology for amplifying the political in SD, arguing for an ethical path of resistance and reorientation to support ethical, transformative, self-determined practices of design, education and research.

This contribution presents the abstracts submitted to the 2022 PDC Doctoral Colloquium. The Doctoral Colloquium is a community-building component of the conference that aims to create opportunities for PhD candidates at a range of stages in their research work to be together to share and make new knowledge, discuss the processes and challenges of PhD work and Participatory Design research and practice, and to further ground their participation in, and expansion of, PD worlds.

The notion that policing and incarceration are permanent and necessary, if in need of reform or more “humane” design, guides contemporary practices of making in a range of design fields and, increasingly, designers’ forays into policy- and government service-making. These projects often take the form of spatial interventions and proposals for new jails, police stations, and, in some cases, the reorganization of the spaces around them. This article examines three projects—Chicago’s Polis Station, the New York City Justice Hubs, and the Oakland Power Projects—that contend with the infrastructure of the prison industrial complex, in part by asking people questions about policing and incarceration to envision what to build. Here, I focus on what shaped these questions, and how the questions in turn shaped the possibilities for design that emerged from them, in ways that matter deeply to the imbrication of architecture, design, and punishment.

Despite welcome explorations of difference in Service Design approaches in recent scholarship, the prevailing notion that the field is measured by tools, methods, and outcomes limits how SD might contribute to openended practices of self-determined design and capacity-making in socially and politically-grounded contexts. We draw on a two-year service design collaboration among three learning-communities with differently situated students to suggest means for "holding open" collaborative work in process as a way to both create space for collectivity and to grapple with difference, tension, and emergent conditions. This framework is a proposition for self-determined service design, rooted in the complex contexts of collaborators' experiences and self-articulated desires. We argue for extending SD practitioners' and researchers' understandings of uncertainty (Alexander, 2006) and the unknown (Akama, Pink & Sumartojo, 2018) to consider these as approaches for engaging in plurality and emergence, rather than seeing them as conditions requiring mitigation to reach a specific end-goal.

Value in collaborative design research and practice can be understood fundamentally as relationships, materials, processes, contexts, and outcomes that are subjects of and for negotiation. We argue for conceptions of value that move beyond traditional ‘outcomes’ based measurements to reimagine and rearticulate value itself as co-created, emerging from negotiation, relationality and immersion in specific contexts. These understandings of value, we argue, are not rooted in or always knowable through designers’ experiences, even as designers participate in creating them. Using case studies from our research we suggest that value in design collaboration emerges as a question: value to whom, and to what end? We propose that addressing these questions ethically through co-design requires actively engaged, grounded work with collaborators based in three principles: being present for the work, participant making, and co-creating capacity for collaborators to ‘go off and do their thing’.

Despite the recognised need for service design (SD) to understand the complexity in which it intervenes, we are concerned with its desire to fix dynamic configurations through a dominant instrumentalized worldview. We critique the journey map – an iconic method in SD – as one illustration of this fixing tendency in order to highlight how nuanced details are sometimes designed out and argue why such omission is ethical and political. In contrast, following feminist theory, we ground our accounts of practice to argue that service ecologies are situated and continually emergent, constituted by the changing configuration of various things. Instead of fixing to make static or finalise, we use freezing as a temporary state to trace and orientate our movements in a co-design workshop. The similarity of and tension between notions of fixing and freezing is used to call out nuanced differences and attend to the intrinsic, dynamic and temporal nature of service design.

This article argues for an active role for theory in designing, especially feminist theory and cultural studies, both as a means of theorizing design through the work of designers and as a means of reflecting on the complex contexts in which designing takes place and designs take hold. This has particular relevance in the participatory and user-centered frameworks increasingly favored in design practices and education. Changes in design methods, the emergence of "design thinking" in a range of fields including but not always linked to design, and the growth of contemporary "social design" over the past two decades have greatly shifted design practices and contexts. This article argues that Donald Schön's exploration and theorization of "reflective practice" should be expanded to include a framework for seeing what designers are "reflecting through" in relationship to their own position and location. Building on Lucy Suchman's argument for "located accountability," the author proposes that critical engagement with a range of theories of worldmaking and worldknowing to increase and ground design and designers' points of reference is critical to practice and, therefore, education in design fields.