Investigating opportunities for Service Design in Education for Sustainable Development

This research investigates opportunities for Service Design in Education. The focus is on a particular type of change happening within education that of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) where Service Design has little presence and limited knowledge. This research has been carried out through grounded theory and contextualised in English institutions of primary education. As a result it identified Service Design as an approach to enable transformational change within educational institutions that seek to move towards ESD. To establish the basis for the research, a literature review has been carried out on Service Design, the vision of ESD and its application in the context of English schools. As a result, Service Design capability to re-design services at organisational level was linked to the gap in normative re-educative change processes towards ESD in English schools. The rest of the research sought to build on these findings. In-depth case studies with five primary schools and a cross-case analysis have been carried out to establish an understanding of ESD change at organisational level. It focused on elements relevant to normative re-educative change processes, which included social and personal norms and values residing within organisational systems. From the case studies, principles, concepts and processes were identified that enabled schools to engage with ESD at the deepest level. The knowledge derived from the case studies was further developed in order to relate the ESD phenomenon to Service Design. Service thinking and organisational change theory were applied to develop a Sustainable Education as a Service Model (SES MODEL) to understand ESD as a phenomenon in a service system. A SES Model was presented back to Service Design community. The sense-making of ESD was undertaken with seven service design practitioners by conducting semi-structured interviews during which they explored the SES Model. The outcome of the interviews showed the model to build service designer s capacity to engage with ESD, while the use of the model showed that designers could envision using it at a normative re-educative change level. The research shows that ESD is a new concept, which is relevant to Service Design. It therefore offers opportunities for further service design research and practical applications

Positioning service design as transformational approach in education for sustainable development (ESD).

Through the review of literature, as part of a PhD research undertaken at Loughborough University, a relationship between Service Design and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) has been identified. It positions Service Design and its participatory design methodology as an integral change agent within this context. A lack of literature defining such theoretical positioning means that service designers do not have a defined space to operate within nor do they have a view of a broad impact that their action can have. This paper presents findings from the literature review that positions Service Design as a transformative change approach in the context of ESD

Systems and service design and the circular economy

We must instead always strive to design, work, and live sustainably. The voices throughout this handbook present many different characteristics, layers, approaches, and perspectives in this journey of sustaining

Education and sustainable development: a new context for design

The subject matter of design is the one that concerns itself with change and alternative resolutions (Buchanan, 1995). Increasingly design problems are issue-led with an emerging metaissue of sustainable development (SD) (Fuad-Luke, 2009). This paper discusses the issue of SD in the context of public services in the UK as an opportunity for design. As there is a great diversity in the context, organizational complexity, design and delivery of public services, the focus is on the UK primary education. UNESCO (2009) identified education to be critical in promoting SD and for schools to become ‘centres of expertise and innovation’ in the area. A non mandatory goal from the government and the lack of clarity in definition of SD (Bourn, 2005) leaves schools without strategic incentive for change. The preliminary findings from the interviews of six case studies presented in this paper will seek to explore and identify characteristics and current approaches to SD in the UK schools. The findings will become a foundation for discussion of the role of design within this new context

Service design approach to the annual degree programme review practices

This research paper addresses the challenge faced across the education sector of how to design, organise and maintain a quality educational experience in HE. The findings are based on a two-year research project in Lancaster University followed by a 10 months investigation in four other UK Universities. The paper shows how applying service design approach to programme review empowers student voice and creates a conduit to incorporate more empathetic and human-centered view of student experience. Service design has been successfully adapted from commercial setting to the improvements of public sector, including patient experience in the NHS and to enhance citizen engagement with gov.uk services. The paper provides a critical review of the suitability and adaptability of serviced design to the HE context and it reflects on its benefits as well as challenges connected with the problematised framing of HE as a service sector. </p

Service Blueprint for Sustainable Business Model Evaluation

The adverse societal impacts caused by sharing mobility - a form of service-based sustainable business model innovations, showed that operation activities and managerial practices impact heavily on the sustainable value of a service offering. To identify how new service development (NSD) activities can better support the proposed service offering for sustainability, evaluating sustainability of service operations is needed. This study draws learnings from service design, product-service system and sustainable innovation research streams, to build sustainability evaluation framework into service blueprint. Six expert-interviews and two mobility case studies were developed, to illustrate service blueprint's capability in mapping sustainability input and benefits created during NSD and service operation activities. Results revealed a) the shift from using sustainable ‘value’ to ‘benefits’ concept in service operation evaluation, b) the public-private collaboration dilemma and c) the agile NSD and sustainable innovation incompatibility. This paper aims to offer a springboard for practitioners and researchers to uncover compelling insights, discuss latest service design developments, and envision future directions for integrating sustainability into service-based business model innovation.<br

Content model as a tool for re-designing services at transformational level: case study of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)

Service Designers have been working in organisations at a transformational level using tools and methods that primarily focus on the needs of the individuals. Change theories suggest that for transformational change to take place in organisations, change in individuals needs to happen in relation to change at organisational level. Thus service designers need knowledge that enables them to envision what change may look like at an organisational level. This paper presents a case study of a content model that was developed as part of the design research to represent such knowledge. The model represents education for sustainable development (ESD) as a vision of a new service provided by schools to students. It draws on empirical data collected from five schools, organisational change theory and service thinking to show the service/user relationship that needs to be developed at a school level to move schools towards the provision of ESD. The model was tested with seven service designers through in-depth interviews. The findings support understanding and usability of the model in the design process as a tool for transformation but also highlight barriers that a model as a stand-alone tool presents. Wider issues in relation to service designers engaging with transformational change within schools are also discussed

An exploration of service design jam and its ability to foster social enterprise

Social enterprises (SE) are valued as innovative solutions to complex problems but require conditions to nurture and support them. Most support systems rely on individuals who already have an SE idea, and there is very little research on understanding what conditions can support to cultivate the willingness and motivation to engage individuals in this activity. An exploratory study was led to understand whether a particular event, Service Design Jam, can provide such conditions. The paper introduces the study of the Lufbra Jam, organised at Loughborough University, from which two social enterprises, Crop Club in 2013, and FrenPals in 2014 emerged. Through literature review desirability and feasibility were extrapolated as key variables to the formation process of social enterprises. A focus group with three Lufbra Jam organisers was led to identify important organisational elements of the Jam that were perceived to have an impact on the formation of the successful SE thus influencing the perception of desirability and feasibility of SE in individuals. The integration of the two created a thematic matrix that was used to analyse findings from the research with the participants of the two successful SE Cases. The research findings suggest that Lufbra Jam enabled individuals to identify socially and environmentally focused issues and formulate service solutions that they deemed to be desirable and feasible. It also provided an insight that winning and an enterprising workshop were important SDJ elements that helped teams to recognise their service ideas not only as feasible solutions but as SE opportunity for the team to take forward

Reflection by design: applying a design methodology to enhance student learning journey through reflective practice

There are multiple forms of reflective practice, such as models developed by Kolb (1984) and Gibbs (1988), which are routinely drawn upon within Higher Education teaching, learning and assessment. However, in the authors’ experience, these are used in an ad hoc manner across different modules and activities with little attempt to embed a coherent longitudinal approach to support development of reflective practice across an academic programme or within the wider student journey. This chapter reflects on a project which used service design thinking to inform and develop student engagement with reflective practice across one year post graduate courses within a UK Higher Education institution. It reports on the authors’ experience of: introducing reflective concepts; co-creating interventions with the students; embedding these within the student journey and evaluating the effectiveness of a pedagogical approach derived from service design thinking to engage students in the reflective process. The project was undertaken drawing on experiences from students who have an understanding of concepts from service design, but the chapter goes on to consider how lessons learnt could be applied more widely with higher education teaching and curriculum development practices. It concludes by arguing that service design offers a new way of conceptualising how reflective practice fits within student learning journeys. It also suggests that pedagogic tools developed from service design may offer an alternative way to engage students in deeper critical reflection across their learning journey and support development of individual reflective practice

Service design meets strategic action: Exploring new tools for activating change

Design can positively contribute towards the highly complex social, economic and environmental problems we face today. One key area in design for social change is to empower citizens to activate change that disrupts built-in systemic inequalities and exploitative practices. This workshop presents the ‘Action Heroes Journey’, a resource kit co-developed by designers and CitizensUK community organisers to enable active citizen participation in public life. Based on Joseph Campbell’s (2008) Hero’s Journey storytelling framework, the toolkit integrates methods from service design and community organising and is aimed to help users to discover and align their personal values with the future development of their community. Although the resource was co-designed with and for young people initially, the archetypal structure allows the embedding of vernacular goals and meanings – i.e. increasing leadership, participation and co-creation that is meaningful at a personal level. It also connects with other stakeholder’s priorities, for example, NGOs and local government citizen and sustainability strategies. Participants will learn how service design can be used to develop creative leadership capacity and enhancing wider and more diverse engagement in the socio-political sphere