Service Design Workshops in Design Practice

The research interest of this article-based dissertation has focused on service design workshops and their connection to design practice. They have been studied through four distinctive sub-studies in which the focus has been in the people and their experiences of the service design workshops by gathering together academic, professional and pragmatic perspectives. The empirical data was collected in three different contexts: ARSTMO, PARTY and GLiV as well as in four different countries: Finland, Russia, Namibia and South Africa from 2014 to 2018. This dissertation introduces a practice-based perspective towards service design workshops. The study has focused on investigating the theme through the main research question: How do service design workshops foster design practice? Overall, the term ‘practice-based’ connects all the elements of this study: theoretical, designerly and practical. The key themes, which unfold through the dissertation, connecting research and practice are service design, design practice, community and social (includes societal and interaction perspectives). In the dissertation, services are understood as practices that are performed through people’s day-to-day activities. They are not only happening and created in companies and organisations but deeply rooted in our ways of living and being and in our cultural habits and societies. This places service design inherently in local and social contexts where acknowledging and embracing complexities, plurality and diversity are required from the designer. Service design workshops are spaces where discoveries, development and remodelling of existing as well as future practices can emerge in collaboration. This has a strong influence on designers as it makes them part of a community of practice that is appearing in the workshop through the co-design activities. Workshops are discussed as a possibility to look beyond the immediate outcome of design and service. Through them, it is possible to embed the design process and practice in local and specific situations. The focus of the research has been on the people and their experiences of the service design workshops. I have positioned myself as a researcher–practitioner–designer in the workshops, and I have realised the value of shifting my position along the way in order to study service design workshops from different viewpoints. Also, the focus has changed through the sub-studies from design students and teachers to professional designers and on to the participants of the workshops. Accordingly, the results are discussed from three different perspectives: 1) academic, 2) professional and 3) pragmatic. This way, the dissertation promotes a perspective where service design workshops are seen as one of the central ways of practicing design and design research with communities.Tämän artikkelipohjaisen väitöskirjan tutkimuskohteena ovat palvelumuotoilutyöpajat ja niiden tarkastelu osana yhteisöllistä muotoilutoimintaa. Työpajoja on tutkittu neljän erillisen alatutkimuksen kautta, jotka ovat keskittyneet työpajoihin osallistuvien ihmisten kokemuksiin eri painopistein. Empiiristä tietoa on kerätty kolmessa eri projektiluontoisessa kontekstissa: ARSTMO, PARTY ja GLiV sekä neljässä eri maassa: Suomessa, Venäjällä, Namibiassa ja Etelä-Afrikassa vuosina 2014–2018. Väitöskirja esittelee käytäntölähtöisen näkökulman palvelumuotoilutyöpajoihin. Teemaa on tutkittu pääkysymyksen avulla: Kuinka palvelumuotoilutyöpajat edistävät muotoilutoimintaa ja -käytäntöä? Kaiken kaikkiaan termi käytäntölähtöinen yhdistää kaikki tämän tutkimuksen elementit. Väitöskirjassa avautuvat pääteemat, jotka yhdistävät tutkimuksen, käytännön ja muotoilun, ovat: palvelumuotoilu, muotoilutoiminta, yhteisöllinen sekä sosiaalinen, pitäen sisällään vuorovaikutuksellisen ja yhteiskunnallisen näkökulman. Väitöskirjassa palvelut ymmärretään käytännöiksi, jotka ovat osa arkea ja konkretisoituvat ihmisten päivittäisissä toimissa. Palveluita ei suunnitella ja toteuteta vain yrityksissä ja organisaatioissa, vaan niiden käyttö on osa arkipäivää, jonka kautta ne juurtuvat syvälle ihmisten elämäntapoihin sekä laajemmin myös kulttuureihin ja yhteiskuntaan. Tämä sijoittaa palvelumuotoilun luonnostaan paikallisiin ja sosiaalisiin tilanteisiin, joissa muotoilijalta vaaditaan kykyä navigoida monimutkaisten tilanteiden läpi yhteisöjen kanssa sekä moniarvoisuuden sekä monimuotoisuuden huomioimista. Palvelumuotoilutyöpajat ovat tilanteita, joissa olemassa olevien ja tulevaisuuden käytäntöjen kehittämistä voidaan tehdä yhteistyössä ja yhteisöllisesti. Tällä on vaikutusta muotoilijan työhön, koska se sijoittaa hänet osaksi käytäntöyhteisöä, joka syntyy ja muokkaantuu työpajassa jaetun muotoilutoiminnan kautta. Väitöskirjassa työpajoja käsitellään mahdollisuutena nähdä muotoilun ja palvelun välittömän lopputuloksen yli. Niiden kautta on mahdollista keskittyä muotoilutoimintaan laajempana ilmiönä sekä sulauttaa muotoilukäytäntö paikalliseen ja kyseiseen kontekstiin. Tutkimuksen painopiste on ollut ihmisissä ja heidän kokemuksissaan palvelumuotoilutyöpajoissa. Itse olen työpajoissa ollut tutkija-toimija-muotoilija ja tuntenut tärkeäksi vaihdella omaa positiotani tutkiakseni työpajoja mahdollisimman monesta tulokulmasta. Tutkimuksen painopiste on siirtynyt neljän alatutkimuksen johdattamana muotoilun opiskelijoista ja opettajista ammattilaisiin ja lopuksi työpajojen osallistujiin sekä yksilöinä että yhteisöinä. Näin ollen tuloksista keskustellaan kolmesta eri näkökulmasta: 1) akateeminen, 2) ammatillinen ja 3) käytännönläheinen. Tutkimuksen tulosten mukaan palvelumuotoilutyöpajat voidaan nähdä yhtenä keskeisenä tapana muotoiluun ja muotoilun tutkimukseen yhteisöjen kanssa

Evaluating creativity support in co-design workshops

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Empowering vulnerable women by participatory design workshops

This contribution addresses the issue of homeless women’s empowerment through design workshops and according to the capability approach. The paper presents small, ordinary stories of women that experience being designers. Besides the professional label, being a designer means to approach reality from the transformative perspective of pursuing a positive change. It also translates in claiming the space for the expression of a personal vision of the world, within a cooperative environment. It enables to experiment innovative strategies to solve problems and to pursue self-determination in practical activities

Inclusive clothing design: workshops based on case studies

Inclusive clothing design emerges from users’ need to use products to their fullest. Despite being a segment with a wide variety of models, the great dysfunctionality of uses for people with movement restrictions still shows. Discussing this situation with designers is necessary to change perspectives toward inclusion when approaching unconventional scenarios in product development. For a preliminary approach to the subject, workshops can generate reflections for inclusive product development from the perspective of dressing-related problems. For this purpose, workshops were held at IDEGUI in Guimarães (Portugal) on practical approaches to discuss ideas and create inclusive alternatives. The results of the discussion were proposals like alternatives for the clothing market. These proposals can already be found in the clothing market, but still, the results are not entirely obsolete since they were not presented as an option from the beginning. The participants’ interest, added to previous experiences, brought exciting complements to the discussion and dissemination of inclusive clothing design through a systemic perception of product development

A web-based teaching/learning environment to support collaborative knowledge construction in design

A web-based application has been developed as part of a recently completed research which proposed a conceptual framework to collect, analyze and compare different design experiences and to construct structured representations of the emerging knowledge in digital architectural design. The paper introduces the theoretical and practical development of this application as a teaching/learning environment which has significantly contributed to the development and testing of the ideas developed throughout the research. Later in the paper, the application of BLIP in two experimental (design) workshops is reported and evaluated according to the extent to which the application facilitates generation, modification and utilization of design knowledge

Using Information Visualization to Support Creativity in Service Design Workshops

In this paper we outline ongoing PhD research in which we are exploring how information visualization can be used to make quantitative data more accessible and engaging to key stakeholder representatives during service design workshops. We also outline how such visualizations could be used in conjunction with applied creativity techniques to identify ideas for design requirements that are both novel and appropriate, and therefore considered creative. We illustrate this research with details of a workshop held with customers and staff of E.ON Energy in which the objective was to design new services that utilise the data generated by smart energy meters

Playing in the special education school: from gamers to game designers

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