No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Systemic oppression in service design
Abstract
Systemic oppression is the enduring dehumanization of certain social groups, thereby maintaining their political, social, and economic disadvantage. Service design, most notably in digital labor platforms, has become entangled in the reproduction of oppression through capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial systems. Collaborating with the social movements that challenge these systems is a possible way forward for systemic service design. Still, self-criticism is needed to avoid reproducing oppression while trying to overcome it. With this aim, this chapter scrutinizes service design’s role in the cascading effect of systemic oppression, taking digital labor platforms as a paradigmatic example. By mapping the oppressive cascade from metadesigners to designers and from users to infrausers, this research identifies the crucial role played by the theater model in oppressive service design. To furnish an alternative model for systemic service design, we draw from Theatre of the Oppressed and Black intersectional feminism.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
To support transformation in service systems, scholars argue for greater attention to power dynamics in service design (SD). While current literature stresses the need for individual service designers to be reflexive about power, it neglects the context within which these designers predominantly work. We argue that such an individual focus overlooks key contextual factors that hinder service designers from addressing power dynamics. This narrowed view of the challenge unintentionally positions service designers as scapegoats, while their inability to address power dynamics effectively persists. In response, we draw on ecological theories in psychology, which offer insights into how individuals' behaviors are interconnected with factors in their context. We introduce a framework for understanding these interconnections, detailing how we used it to identify and analyze domains of contextual factors that inhibit service designers to address power dynamics in practice. By proposing a systemic framework, identifying related contextual factors, and evaluating applicability with service designers, this study lays the groundwork for structural shifts to address power dynamics in service design more effectively.
Witnessing the speed of growth and reach in demand for service design (SD) confronts us to ask what neoliberal forces are behind this acceleration? Are services, systems and structures really improving at this velocity, and what are we eroding and ignoring in turn? Pausing to ask about the direction and effect of change is critical to recognising SD’s implication in the status quo. This paper presents a methodology of noticing precedents that are quotidian and dystopian to show how dominant logics of SD are commodifying social practices of relating and organising. By slowing down to attend, listen and reflect, our approaches reveal existing rituals, values, nuances and commitments that teach us what an apolitical SD fails to see. We contribute a methodology for amplifying the political in SD, arguing for an ethical path of resistance and reorientation to support ethical, transformative, self-determined practices of design, education and research.
In this commentary we explore how, in a market system that increasingly demands the participation of consumers as co-creators through self-service technologies, these technologies pose significant challenges to various consumers. We call this increase in demand the 'everyday-ification' of co-creation and consider its effect on consumers who are either unwilling or unable to co-create value. We look at how marketers are motivated to persistently replace human labor with technologies, not to primarily benefit consumers, but to discipline consumer labor and to maximize profits and shareholder value. Through this lens we examine five key issues with self-service technologies. First, we discuss how costs and benefits associated with self-service technologies are unequally allocated, before addressing how consumers' choices are managed, consumers' rising sense of powerlessness and increased vulnerabilities, consumers' service failure responsibilization, and the cybernetic bureaucracy of life through self-service technologies.
Cybernetics is a science characterized by the utopian search for new relationships between different areas of knowledge.
After the Second World War, the best-known references in Western academia were Norbert Wiener’s approaches to this new
discipline. However, there is another little-known hemisphere of this development that remains understudied and we claim
is key for its history which refers to the pioneering work of scientists, engineers and cultural practitioners in Latin America,
as well as the materialization of specific experiences that lead us to reflect on the role that some regional milestones could
have had in the global context. This volume of AI & Society covers points of view that were structured in the various most
emblematic stages of these trajectories with the participation of agents that went beyond the assimilation and interpreta-
tion of external models, transforming themselves into fundamental and pioneering experiences, among others, the work of
Mexican scientist Arturo Rosenblueth, or the impact of the concept of Autopoiesis. Through this article we introduce the
outcome of the research—presented in great length in the contributions of this volume—on some of the main stages and
trends that constituted the evolution of cybernetics in Latin America. The particular contributions of the authors in this issue
have helped to reconstituting these contexts while developing a continuous horizon which also explores future practices.
Design research is geting interested in social movements in recent years. Organizing tactics like coalition-building have been taken from civil rights movements and turned into operative concepts such as designing coalitions that point towards converging interests. As such, this concept cannot support social movements, which are not formed by common interests, but by pressing social needs ignored in official and everyday politics. This advances further the revision of the designing coalition concept based on feminist literature and on the authors' experience in weaving the Design & Oppression Network in Brazil. This network was formed in 2020 by design professors, students, and professionals from all over Brazil, as well as from other countries. From its inception, the network was concerned with the Latin-American reality — colonized, culturally invaded, underdeveloped, and oppressed in various ways by the Global North. The network approaches design as a pedagogical and critical process so that the production of design space becomes an opportunity for listening, reflection, dispute, synthesis, mutual care, and insurgence acSons against all forms of oppression. From this experience, we propose the alternative concept of insurgent design coalitions to deepen design engagements with social movements.
Money is a crucial mediation for organizing in capitalist societies. Those who lack money cannot easily organize and raise collective consciousness. A naive form of consciousness may reject money to prevent greed and envy. Nevertheless, a critical state of consciousness should perceive money as a tool that can be redesigned to encourage different feelings that can ballast anti-capitalist transacFons. This research describes Colaborativa@PE, a collective who designed digital social currencies to nurture solidarity bonds in several cultural production collectives spread through Brazil. These collectives embarked on an inquiry that led them to experiment with solidarity economy and self- management. The need to digitize their self-management practices brought them to Corais Platform, a free so^ware/design suite that adopts a parFcipatory metadesign approach. Colaborativa@PE's members joined the platforms' metadesign and proposed a new social currency tool, soon implemented. With this new tool, the Colaborativa@PE's associated collectives greatly expanded their self-management handiness degree, becoming more critical of its possibilities and limitations for organizing. While analyzing this case, this research concludes that the redesign process can be characterized as a form of conscientization in light of Paulo Freire's and Álvaro Vieira Pinto's works.
Historically, social structures such as norms, rules, roles, and beliefs have represented externalities in service design. However, a view of service as a multi-actor value cocreation process, guided by institutionalized social structures, brings them to the fore as central service design materials. With the current article, we seek to extend understanding of social structures as service design materials and build knowledge regarding how to integrate these materials in service design processes. Drawing from institutional theory, we elaborate on the materiality of social structures and propose a conceptual framework that highlights their invisibility and duality, as well as their composition of multiple institutional pillars. Then with a research through design approach, we build on this conceptual framework to develop a practical process for exposing and working with social structures as service design materials.
Recent literature on Participatory Design describes the act of designing coalitions around a matter of concern. This paper challenges the notion of concern as the ontological basis of coalitions. Coalitions are, in fact, political organizational forms that have a long history in civil rights movements, characterized by the provisional union of different oppressed groups in times of intense repression. According to feminist literature, what unites people in feminist coalitions are matters of care and not matters of concern. Following this shift of perspective, this research critically revises the notion of designing coalitions while analyzing a codesign project for increasing women coffee workers' visibility in a particular region of Latin America.
This paper explores how the approach, logic and tools of Service Design could support the development of a digital platform that enable the collaborative design of open and collaborative design processes. By integrating Service Design, Activity Theory and Meta-Design, such platform could foster community building and management providing concepts and visualizations that help users in the conscious and reflexive design of the activities constituting their community-based collaborative design processes. How could Service Design enable the meta-design of collaborative design processes on digital platforms? This paper elaborates a proposal for integrating Service Design concepts and tools into a meta-design digital platform for the design and management of collaborative design processes, by providing 1) a reflection on the theoretical connections between Service Design, Activity Theory and Meta-Design, 2) a proposal of a meta-design platform that represents a proof of concept of such connections and 3) a proposal of evaluation strategies for validating such platform.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.
Based on a qualitative survey among 203 US workers active on the microwork platform Amazon Mechanical Turk, we analyze potential biases embedded in the institutional setting provided by on-demand crowdworking platforms and their effect on perceived workplace fairness. We explore the triadic relationship between employers, workers, and platform providers, focusing on the power of platform providers to design settings and processes that affect workers’ fairness perceptions. Our focus is on workers’ awareness of the new institutional setting, frames applied to the mediating platform, and a differentiated analysis of distinct fairness dimensions.
How does one value something one cannot and often does not want to see? How do contemporary digital platforms and their infrastructures of connectivity, evaluation, and surveillance affect this relationship between value and visibility, when it is mediated through the problem of labor as at once a commodity and a lived experience? And how can these infrastructures be mobilized in projects that aim to build different kinds of platforms – the kinds that support the revaluation low-income service work? This essay addresses these questions by examining the gendered, racialized, and classed distribution of opportunities and vulnerabilities associated with digitally mediated service work, or what I call platform labor. The argument will unfold in four parts. First, I briefly situate the ‘on-demand’ economy within the context of neoliberal socio-economic reforms that have, over the past four decades, shaped our present circumstances. Second, I argue that labor platforms should be understood as new players in the temporary staffing industry, whose devices and practices exacerbate the already precarious conditions of contingent workers in today’s low-income service economy. They do so by (1) bolstering the immunity of platform intermediaries and clients, (2) by expanding managerial control over workers, and (3) by orchestrating a pervasive sense of fungibility and superfluity with respect to this workforce. Third, after a short overview of the gendered and racialized history of service work, I analyze how this history extends into the networked present of our platform economy. Finally, I address the potential of ethnography, on the one hand, and platform cooperativism, on the other, to critically empower low-income service workers operating through platforms.
The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it seeks to use a practical real-world example to demonstrate the power of a systems thinking perspective in design, and more specifically in the design of services. It makes use of the paradigm of e-accessibility, in the application domain of publicly available self-services. Secondly, the benefits of this perspective will be discussed, through some theoretical tenets of systems thinking, such as the use of emerging properties, the law of requisite variety and notions of second order cybernetics, in terms of the richness that they offer to the conceptualisation and praxis of design in general, and service design in particular. Finally, we speculate on the implications of systems thinking to question the nature of the interdisciplinarity and even transdisciplinarity of design.
While there is a small body of research on service provision by groups that espouse a willingness to use violence, this research often is based on a presumption that service provision is used solely as a utilitarian tool to recruit members for political or violent activities. Through an examination of service provision by the Black Panther Party (BPP), the authors seek to problematize the utilitarian notion of service provision by reframing political activism, service, and violence as parallel acts of resistance serving similar purposes of countering oppression and healing communities. During field research in Oakland, California, extensive information was collected through interviews with former BPP members and recipients of BPP social services, as well as archival documents and audiovisual materials produced both about and by the BPP. The analysis explores several examples of the BPP offering free healthcare, breakfast, and education services. The data provide evidence that an organization that has been traditionally framed as militant not only acted rationally, but also provided an important defense for their community. Both their social service provision and their commitment to bear arms were viewed locally as acts of compassion, protection, and love.
Purpose
This paper aims to describe relationships between cybernetics and design, especially service design, which is a component of service‐craft; to frame cybernetics as a language for design, especially behavior‐focused design.
Design/methodology/approach
The material in this paper was developed for a course on cybernetics and design. Work began by framing material on cybernetics in terms of models. As the course progressed, the relevance of the models to design became clearer. A first focus was on applying the models to describe human‐computer interaction; later another focus emerged, viewing cybernetic processes as analogs for design processes. These observations led to a review of the history of design methods and design rationale.
Findings
The paper argues that design practice has moved from hand‐craft to service‐craft and that service‐craft exemplifies a growing focus on systems within design practice. It also proposes cybernetics as a source for practical frameworks that enable understanding of dynamic systems, including specific interactions, larger systems of service, and the activity of design itself. It also shows that development of first‐ and second‐generation design methods parallels development of first‐ and second‐generation cybernetics. Finally, it argues that design is essentially political, frames design as conversation, and proposes cybernetics as a language for design and a foundation of a broad design education.
Research limitations/implications
The paper suggests opportunities for more research on the historical relationship between cybernetics and design methods, and design research on modeling user goals.
Practical implications
The paper offers tools for understanding and managing the complicated communities of systems that designers increasingly face.
Originality/value
The paper suggests models useful for practicing designers and proposes changes to design education.
PURPOSE: This research theorizes the condition of human beings reduced to being users (and only users) in human-computer interaction (HCI), a condition that favors them becoming objects or targets of commercial dark patterns, racialized profiling algorithms, generalized surveillance, gendered interfaces and heteromation.
DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: The reconceptualization of the users’ condition is done by confronting HCI theories on users with a dialectical-existential perspective over human ontology. The research is presented as a conceptual paper that includes analyzing and revising those theories to develop a conceptual framework for the user oppression in HCI.
FINDINGS: Most HCI theories contribute to the user oppression with explicit or implicit ontological statements that denies their becoming-more or the possibility of users developing their handiness to the full human potential. Put together, these statements constitute an ideology called userism.
SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS: HCI needs to acknowledge its role in structuring oppression not just in sexism, racism, classism and ableism, but also the specific relation that pertains to HCI: userism. Similar to other fields, acknowledging oppression is the first step toward liberating from oppression.
ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The user is an existential condition for HCI theories, yet few theories can explain in depth how this condition affects human development. From the dialectical-existential perspective, the user condition can be dehumanizing. Computers may intensify existing oppressions through esthetic interactions but these interactions can be subverted for liberation.
KEYWORDS: Users, Human-Computer Interaction, Oppression, Ontological design, Social justice informatics, Userism
Moving into the social and public sector, service design is becoming both more complex and more participatory. This is reflected in the greater diversity and interrelatedness of stakeholders and the wicked problems being addressed. However, although many service designers working in the social and public domains bring into their design practice the intention to make design more participatory and equitable, they may lack an in-depth understanding of power, privilege, and the social structures (norms, roles, rules, assumptions, and beliefs) that uphold structural inequality. In this paper we present findings from seven interviews with service designers to investigate the challenges they face when addressing power issues in design, and their experiences of how power shows up in their design process. By drawing from understandings of power in social theory, as well as the interviewees’ perspectives on how power manifests in design practice, we outline a framework for power literacy in service design. The framework comprises five forms of power found in design practice: privilege, access power, goal power, role power, and rule power. We conclude by suggesting that service design practices that make use of reflexivity to develop power literacy may contribute to more socially just, decolonial, and democratic design practices. http://www.ijdesign.org/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/4120/961
Human Centred Design (HCD) is emerging in Australia as a participatory approach to service design in social work and human services organisations. In this article, we reflect upon our incorporation of HCD into a core unit offered to final-year students in a Bachelor of Social Work (Honours) degree, as part of a collaboration between design and social work academics. We highlight successes and challenges, and identify adaptations that can provide HCD with a stronger strength-based, critical approach that better aligns with critical social work education. We provide suggestions for social work practitioners and educators around implementing HCD, in ways that inspire critical and reflexive thinking, promote social justice and focus on designing for progressive, structural and social change.
An exploration of a new division of labor between machines and humans, in which people provide value to the economy with little or no compensation.
The computerization of the economy—and everyday life—has transformed the division of labor between humans and machines, shifting many people into work that is hidden, poorly compensated, or accepted as part of being a “user” of digital technology. Through our clicks and swipes, logins and profiles, emails and posts, we are, more or less willingly, participating in digital activities that yield economic value to others but little or no return to us. Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi call this kind of participation—the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in computer-mediated networks—“heteromation.” In this book, they explore the social and technological processes through which economic value is extracted from digitally mediated work, the nature of the value created, and what prompts people to participate in the process.
Arguing that heteromation is a new logic of capital accumulation, Ekbia and Nardi consider different kinds of heteromated labor: communicative labor, seen in user-generated content on social media; cognitive labor, including microwork and self-service; creative labor, from gaming environments to literary productions; emotional labor, often hidden within paid jobs; and organizing labor, made up of collaborative groups such as citizen scientists. Ekbia and Nardi then offer a utopian vision: heteromation refigured to bring end users more fully into the prosperity of capitalism.
Design academia and industry has increasingly recognized service as a perspective of design. However, there is still more to explore in design research regarding the assumption that sits beneath this success: What is service? In this paper I explore this question by collecting different perspectives on service that have existed throughout human history: objectified labor, mutual aid, communal sharing, and assistance by contract. By exploring these diverse historical understandings of service, I seek to draw attention to the nature of service as participation.
Although new service development (NSD) studies have contributed to developing systematic approaches to service innovation, their product-oriented and provider-centric perspectives are limited in embracing a value cocreation concept. We investigate how Service Design, as a human-centered and creative approach to service innovation, can reframe NSD processes to implement value cocreation. Multiple case studies on Service Design projects indicate that design-centric approaches can contribute to the whole NSD process in a way that connects organizations’ managerial practices to value cocreation, in that (1) contextual and holistic understandings of user experiences can inform value propositions that better fit users’ value-in-use, (2) codesign with creative supporting tools can facilitate value cocreation by helping users better apply their own resources, (3) prototyping can optimize firms’ resource and process configuration to facilitate users’ engagement with the service, (4) aligning system actors to the user experience can organize and mobilize them to better support users’ value creation, and (5) user-centered approaches and methods can help organizational staff build long-term capability for supporting users’ value creation. Based on the link between Service Design, NSD, and value cocreation, we propose a conceptual NSD model, geared toward value cocreation.
In this paper, we study the way that nascent occupations constructing an occu- pational mandate invoke not only skills and expertise or a new technology to distinguish themselves from other occupations, but also their values. We stud- ied service design, an emerging occupation whose practitioners aim to under- stand customers and help organizations develop new or improved services and customer experiences, translate those into feasible solutions, and implement them. Practitioners enacted their values in their daily work activities through a set of material practices, such as shadowing customers or front-line staff, con- ducting interviews in the service context, or creating ‘‘journey maps’’ of a ser- vice user’s experience. The role of values in the construction of an occupational mandate is particularly salient for occupations such as service design, which cannot solely rely on skills and technical expertise as sources of differentiation. We show how service designers differentiated themselves from other competing occupations by highlighting how their values make their work practices unique. Both values and work practices, what service designers call their ethos, were essential to enable service designers to define the proper conduct and modes of thinking characteristic of their occupational mandate.
The production of design space refers to the activity of an individual or a group of individuals considering alternatives and possibilities for a design brief. Design studies often consider constraints to be a major determinant of design space, yet this paper introduces the notion of contradiction to underscore a dialectical determination of design space. The intention here is to characterise the production of design space as a socio-material rather than a cognitive process. This is accomplished through an in-depth look at a medical imaging centre project and an experiment with design students about the same project. In comparison to the original project, the students' activity reproduced the same contradictions faced by practitioners.
In service operations the importance of the interface with the customer should be recognised. Care must be taken to ensure that activities of great relevance in industrial settings such as productivity and cost reduction are not applied with detrimental consequences to service delivery. Three strategies designed to increase customer satisfaction in service situations are reviewed.
Suggests that behavioural hypothesis, which rearranges or alters any element, by design or accident, will change the overall entity, just like changing bonds or atoms in a molecule creates a new substance, and this is known as molecular modelling — and this can help the marketer to better understand any market entity. States that the first step towards rational service design is a system for visualizing this phenomenon, enabling services to be given proper position and weight in the market entity context. Proposes that people are essential evidence of a service and how they are dressed or act has a bearing on this. Identifies benefits, standards and tolerances, and discusses modifications using tables and figures for emphasis. Concludes that modelling and blueprinting offer a system for marketers which can lead to the kind of experimentation and management necessary to service innovation and development.
Many articles exhort service firm managers to empower workers and first-line supervisors, exploit technology, focus on the customer, and, above all, provide outstanding service. This article proposes a framework to help you evaluate your company's competitive standing in each of these areas. It discusses four types of companies on a continuum, from the company that is simply "available for service" to the firm that delivers world class service. The authors focus on operations, the function that controls the service encounter, and apply the manufacturing strategy paradigm to services as a means of implementing change.
A cybernetic service design approach for taming persuasive service systems: Reflective case studies for design practice
- G Borgefalk
Borgefalk, G. (2021). A cybernetic service design approach for taming persuasive
service systems: Reflective case studies for design practice. [PhD thesis. Royal College
of Art].
Capitalist patriarchy and the case for socialist feminism
- Combahee Collective
- River
Collective, Combahee River. (1979). A black feminist statement. In Z. R. Eisenstein (Ed.),
Capitalist patriarchy and the case for socialist feminism (pp. 362-372). Monthly Review
Press.
Intersectionality as critical social theory
- P H Collins
Collins, P. H. (2019). Intersectionality as critical social theory. Duke University Press.
A realidade incoerente do design em plataformas digitais: uma análise crítica sobre a percepção de designers sobre sua atuação profissional
- A C R F Costa
Costa, A. C. R. F. (2023). A realidade incoerente do design em plataformas digitais: uma
análise crítica sobre a percepção de designers sobre sua atuação profissional [Master Dissertation, Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade de São Paulo].
Dessobons and archaeodesign
- Gutiérrez Borrero
Gutiérrez Borrero, A. (2021). Dessobons and archaeodesign. In Memory full? Reimagining
the relations between design and history. DHS Design History Society Annual Meeting.
https://doi.org/10.26254/med/6309
The Black Panther party: Service to the people programs
- D Hilliard
Hilliard, D. (2008). The Black Panther party: Service to the people programs. Dr. Huey P.
Newton Foundation.
The social ontology of systemic oppression [Doctoral Dissertation, Columbia University
- L A Martin
Martin, L. A. (2020). The social ontology of systemic oppression [Doctoral Dissertation,
Columbia University].
An introduction to service design: Designing the invisible
- L Penin
Penin, L. (2018). An introduction to service design: Designing the invisible. Bloomsbury
Publishing.
The politics and theatre of service design
- L Penin
- C Tonkinwise
Penin, L., & Tonkinwise, C. (2009). The politics and theatre of service design. In IASDR
2009 Proceedings, Manchester, UK (pp. 4327-4338).
Agressora de entregadores em São Conrado é banida de aplicativos de delivery
- R Portes
- R Nascimento
Portes, R & Nascimento, R. (2023, April 10). Agressora de entregadores em São Conrado é banida de aplicativos de delivery. G1. https://g1.globo.com/rj/rio-de-janeiro/
noticia/2023/04/15/agressora-de-entregadores-em-sao-conrado-e-banida-deaplicativos-de-delivery.ghtml
The materials of service design
- F Secomandi
- F Van Amstel
Secomandi, F., & van Amstel, F. (2023). Human bodies. In J. Blonkvist, S. Clatworthy, & S.
Holmlid (Eds.), The materials of service design (pp. 167-172). Edward Elgar Publishing.
https://doi.org/10.4337/9781802203301.00032
Hegelian phenomenology as second-order cybernetics and system theory
- M Sommer
Sommer, M. (2017). Hegelian phenomenology as second-order cybernetics and system theory.
Threads, 5, 59-98. Available at https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/
105754
Decolonizing design research
- F M C Van Amstel
Van Amstel, F. M. C. (2023). Decolonizing design research. In P. A. Rodgers & J. Yee (Eds.),
The Routledge companion to design research (pp. 64-74). Routledge. https://www. doi.
org/10.4324/9781003182443-7
Handbook of Service Design: Plural perspectives and a critical contemporary agenda
- F M C Van Amstel
- F Secomandi
Van Amstel, F. M. C., & Secomandi, F. (upcoming). Collective embodiment in service interfaces. In D. Sangiorgi, L. Penin, & A. Prendiville (Eds), Handbook of Service Design:
Plural perspectives and a critical contemporary agenda. Bloomsbury.
Arquitetura livre: complexidade, metadesign e ciência nômade [Doctoral Dissertation
- C A Vassão
Vassão, C. A. (2008). Arquitetura livre: complexidade, metadesign e ciência nômade [Doctoral Dissertation, Universidade de São Paulo]. https://doi.org/10.11606/T.16.2008.
tde-17032010-140902
O conceito de Tecnologia: Volume II
- Á Vieira Pinto
Vieira Pinto, Á. (2005b). O conceito de Tecnologia: Volume II. Contraponto.