Jung-Joo Lee

Despite technology's pervasive integration into aged care to address aging populations and labor shortages, its deployment often overlooks the critical role of care workers who shape the experience of care through technologies. This paper presents a four-month ethnographic study at a long-term residential aged care facility in Singapore, involving 37 staff members from frontline workers to senior management. We examine how they adopt, implement, and use three distinct digital technologies at different stages of maturity in the delivery of care. Adopting an infrastructuring lens, our findings, presented through six affective vignettes, reveal the invisible labor involved in ''patchworking'' technologies implemented in a top-down, fragmented manner as well as the significant impacts on workers' liability and professional agency. The discussion unpacks the invisible burden of organizational unpreparedness in technology integration, the resulting negotiation of care work's meaning and power differentials with care workers for decent work.

This book explores the adoption and practices of service design within the socio-cultural contexts of East and Southeast Asia, where its applications are shaped by local economic, political, and cultural influences. Through case studies and narratives from academia and practice, the book highlights the plurality of service design in this region, examining how it is understood, institutionalized, and enacted in diverse localities. By focusing on cultural specificity, this work seeks to broaden the conceptualization and practice of service design, emphasizing the importance of local knowledge, values, and contexts in its global development. Key themes include pragmatic adoption, cultural manifestations of value co-creation, and the interplay between traditional and modern approaches in service design.

Since its initial collaboration with the globally renowned design consultancy IDEO in 2009, the Singapore government has established itself as a rapid adopter of design among Asian governments. By examining service design as a socio-cultural practice, this chapter reviews the trajectory of the Singapore government’s design adoption within the framework of pragmatic governance. Through interviews with public officers and case studies, it becomes evident that their design adoption journey has been characterized by pragmatic acculturation, a legacy of the Singapore government. This chapter aims to illustrate how the adoption and impact of service design are influenced by socio-cultural and political contexts. While pragmatic governance provides the rationale for the Singapore government’s design adoption journey, it also exposes critical limitations, notably a partial understanding of design. Our discussion will explore strategies to mitigate this partial understanding within the context of pragmatic governance.

In the domain of design, Asian countries predominantly engage with established frameworks and methodologies, often integrating them from other regions rather than pioneering new ones. This adaptation of philosophies, principles, and methods from various design domains—including human-centered design, interaction design, and user experience design—has been critiqued for its alignment with Western rationalism and neoliberalism, leading to a monolithic view of design. This issue is pronounced in service design, where dominant narratives overshadow the diverse cultural contexts of application. The trend of formalizing service design processes in Asian organizations risks perpetuating this monolithic perspective, neglecting socio-cultural nuances. To address this challenge, reflective dialogues among Asian service design practitioners and researchers are crucial. This chapter introduces an initiative fostering such dialogues, involving service design practitioners and researchers from Japan, South Korea, Mainland China, Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. These discussions revisit service design concepts from cultural perspectives and identify practical challenges and strategies for effective implementation. The findings highlight the need for a nuanced approach to service design in East and Southeast Asia, proposing a future research agenda for its sustained development.