Assignment 4 - Service

Assignment 4 explores ‘service’ processes in design, taking a starting point in design’s growing role in the area of public and social service provision. A challenge of design in this area has been how to engage with those who should receive public and social services such as education and care, ie. the widest possible diversity of people. Public services are often dynamic and rely upon co-production between “users”, service providers, and other actors. To address this, design methods have learned from sociology, anthropology and hybrid methods such as co-design. These approaches transform the role of people other than designers in design, in which they are not considered as passive recipients of services delivered to them but as active, knowledgeable and creative.

In this assignment, we start with a particular group of people in a specific context – adult Swedish-language learners in Tensta. Students explore different ways of understanding and engaging the practicalities of their lives, their knowledge and creativity, informed by methods from design anthropology. The goal is to develop a design proposal for how language learning can be further supported in the everyday life of learners. The assignment will also be guided by guest teachers Brendon Clark and Kajsa Davidsson from Interactive Institute Swedish ICT.

This assignment starts Jan 7 and concludes with a Show-&-tell on Jan 17. There are two tasks in the assignment, one focused on learning from people and context, the other on making and trying out a design proposal. The reading circle discusses these:

• Clark, B., Wagner, J., Lindemalm, K., Bendt, O. (2011) Språkskap: Supporting Second Language Learning “In the Wild”. Proceedings of INCLUDE conference.
• Sangiorgi, D., and Clark, B. (2004) Toward a Participatory Design Approach to Service Design. Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference.