Innovative service design for all

Re-Public, an online journal focusing on innovative developments in contemporary political theory and practice, has just launched its latest special issue, entitled “Innovative Service Design for All“.

Applicable culture: Towards future services for the city of Milan
Walter Aprile, Henrik den Ouden Runshaug and Eyal Fried
This paper briefly introduces an Id-Lab project for the design of the future services for the city of Milan. It touches on the principles of the methodology formalized while realizing the project, proposing an adaptive system for need-prediction and design of future services based on cultural criteria, diverse human resources and innovation use of available technological platforms.

Reflections on how service experiences arise
Mikael Runonen, Sakari Tamminen, and Petri Mannonen
Services are all around us and we all use them. Some of them are of mundane, routine type and we don’t necessarily even consider ourselves as users of them, as it is with, for example, mail delivery. Some services, like services in a spa, we crave for and use with delight. There are also services that we don’t want to use unless it is absolutely necessary. Not many of us are pleased to visit the doctor or the police.

Mind the gap: Theories and practices in managing stakeholders in the service design process
Qin Han
This paper presents on-going PhD research that explores an emerging design field – Service Design, where designers with service organisations from public and private sectors develop service offerings that create value for both customers and providers at different levels.

Beyond the experience: In search of an operative paradigm for the industrialisation of services
Nicola Morelli
The contributions to the definition of a disciplinary corpus for service design come from two main directions: the first focuses on real cases, developing projects that are advancing the practice of service design and making service design visible to private business and public administrations (Cottam & Leadbeater, 2004; Parker & Heapy, 2006; Thackara, 2007). The second area concerns the definition of a methodological framework for service design. The main concern in those studies is on the development of methodological tools for analysing, designing and representing services. (Cottam & Leadbeater, 2004; Morelli, 2003, 2009; Sangiorgi, 2004)

Service design for India: The thinking behind the design of a local curriculum
Soumitri Varadarajan
I have been working on the design of a curriculum for service design for a university in India. What follows is a reflective account of my thinking through the design. I write in the first person to stay true to the thought process that resulted in this specific design. The text is in three parts; I set up the background as a dip into the development discourse in design practice, I then go on to construct a proposition for a university design program, and finally I sketch a program in service design in three steps.

Inclusive governance strategy for urban services delivery: A case analysis from a medium sized city in a low income developing country
Saleh Ahmed
The urban politics in low income developing countries is very much precarious in nature. Improper institutional capacity and insufficient resources usually result in bad management outputs and influence the quality of life. Poor people are the main victims of this situation. This paper highlights the effective role of peoples’ initiatives and their involvements for framing an innovative and locally adaptable service design in context of a medium sized city in a low income developing country.

Secondary education for all: The case of specific learning difficulties (dyslexia)
Gioulina Kokkalia and Aristotelis Skamagkis
Design has the potential to better the societies we live in. In this context, this article argues that design of educational services can improve the educational process. More specifically, we describe our study on secondary education private tutoring schools called “frontistiria” and the inclusion of children with Specific Learning Difficulties. As we are currently running the first phase of the design process we will try to present some specifications for the design of a dyslexia-friendly classroom.

Ceremonial Olympism: Towards an art of democratic dialogue?
Rodanthi Tzanelli
I remember the euphoria that swept round Greece when the Olympiad of 2004 was crowned with Jacques Rogge’s and other global players’ long-awaited congratulations. Recognition is always οn the cards for Olympic ‘hosts’, no matter how marginal the country they inhabit. But the devil hides in details, and once in the political limelight, the host becomes vulnerable to an all-embracing criticism. The organisers have to play their cards right to win the day: from public security, to entertaining global audiences and athletes alike, to forging artworks of beauty and educational value to collecting gold medals, the dream slowly turns into a political nightmare. Since their nineteenth-century inception, the Olympic Games operated as a platform on which nations articulate their own version of modernity, producing universally palatable masks and performing their public Selves for external and internal consumption.

Cohousing: A new form of urban community-based network services
Matthieu Lietaert
The last fifty years have witnessed a radical transformation of the urban contexts, influencing people’s daily lives. On the one hand, this has gone along with the rise of individual’s freedom; but on the other hand, it also went with a manifest collapse of the community. This double phenomenon is not only unprecedented in History; it is also connected to an important paradox: individuals are losing their ties with their community at a period when they might need them increasingly more than before. In fact, many enjoy the positive sides of their urban individual freedom, whereas they also feel increasingly more exhausted as they struggle to face, on their own, the daily soaring stress level, competitive working contexts, changes in family unit (especially single women with children), reduced mobility and social isolation of contemporary urban life.

(via Design for Service)