Three years of Transformative Service and Service Design at Link?ping University

This fall we started the fourth edition of the MSc design here at LiU. We are now looking forward to new service design work the coming semesters, with a specific focus on Transformative Service. The circumstances are new this fall, even though we learned a lot during the spring about working distributed and technology mediated (Mattias Arvola and Jody Foo have been running a bold test, an interaction design studio course fully digitally mediated).

Here, I'd like to share some experiences and recap what has been done since we started 2017, with a specific focus on Transformative Service.

Just a short contextual note. We framed one of the tracks in the programme as Transformative Service. The rationale behind this, based on our almost twenty year long experience from practice and research, is that service designers and service design to a great majority is part of transformation processes in society and organisations. From policy development, over broader systems, to service experience and operations. At the master’s level, this needs to be made explicit, in order not to promote a practice of silent transformation.

In line with the general direction of the LiU MSc Design program, with its three different tracks, we situate service design in societal challenges, such as climate change, migration and civility.

It's the third year we are running the "sketching sharing solutions" exercise. It's a good way to start off the Value Creation course, as it promotes the use of sketching also for more symbolic and abstract issues. Everyone gets a chance to brush off their sketching skills, and it lets us talk about sketching as well as old and novel ways of cocreating values. 

Jana Voykova, Sudeep Sharma and Sofia R?nnberg shared their sketches of bike sharing solutions in the open space of the studio in Link?ping.

By making a structured catalogue of all the sharing solutions that the students find, they are given a chance to deconstruct popular myths around sharing. Now we have a handful of catalogues with different ways of analysing and structuring a joint repertoire of sharing solutions and are looking towards making them available as an open learning resource.

The full name of the course is Contemporary Perspectives on Value Creation, where sharing and commons have been the “contemporary” perspectives we’ve introduced. We are currently looking for other contemporary perspectives and are grateful for any suggestions!

In the course on codesign methods and tools Mina Mani Kashani developed a tiny design game to explore participants habits and preferences about broken objects.

During the second semester the MSc design students work together with Cognitive Science students and Industrial Design Engineering students focusing on challenges of welfare systems, in collaborative projects with public sector organisations in Sweden.

Beate Undén, Joakim ?str?m, Mina Mani Kashani and Solith af Malmborg worked with JobTech Gig at the Swedish Public Employment Service and developed the concept Fair Mother Platform for gig-workers. Among other things they suggested a GigScription service, where customers could sign up for subscriptions of gig-solutions (with Lisa Hemph at JobTech as contact person, see also FairGig and GigLab).

A couple of other examples can be found in this news item. In 2018 there was a twin project with Beijing Institute of Technology, with service design students and professor Luo Qi. One of the projects in Beijing, focusing on housing for newcomers to a city, later received an award at the 10th User eXperience award. Working with public sector organisations, and in interdisciplinary groups, is challenging but rewarding, and give the opportunity to the students to tackle both system complexity and codesign with multiple stakeholders.

The MSc design students make a deep dive during the spring into nomadic welfare, topics and issues that comes with people being nomadic across the many borders and systems that makes up our welfare systems.

Jana Voykova, in her piece 0 below, focused on the idealistic images of the digital nomad, articulated in a series of panels presenting hard truths and critcal statements.

Solith of Malmborg made her nomadic analysis during the pandemic in the spring of 2020, and made these Greetings from Quarantine postcards, with a couple of stories contrasting experiences of isolation before and within the pandemic (see the full set on Solith's Instagram).

Here are a couple of more examples of storytelling based on the nomadic welfare perspective: Stories of Unsettlement by Sara Glassner and Hanna Norden? that uses contrasting images for storytelling; A brief manifesto that portrays a broader sense of welfare through paintings and stories by Luís Rodrigues. Zero below by Jana Voykova. 

Service design in practice is also about understanding and directing transformations. The students’ approach this by analysing a service system at the meso-level, and by working with transformation triggers working with design approaches to take care of the forces of transformation.

Sofia R?nnberg and Shilpi Reema Rath mapped the stakeholders and values that have conflicting and supporting interests in the forests in Sweden, to understand how to transform the relationships and system through design

The range of topics for final thesis work relating to Transformative Service is, as expected, wide. There is Menno van Jarwaarde's work on design at the end of services, and Sudeep Sharma's work focusing on a platform to humanise music. There is Cao Linqi who focused on a method that embody the management of a community when establishing a business in a new culutre, and Jana Yordanova's work that used a speculative stance towards ethics of technology. All theses that are published form the program can be found in the DiVA repository.

The students’ work in service design is at the forefront/s of service design. For me, however, it is equally important as a step towards making the meeting between service and design succeed in the shared challenges around transformation. This is where future service designers will contribute the most, by being proactive in the transformation of organisations, and society as we know it today.