Tag Archive | Anna Meroni

What does social activism mean in service design context?

Sep23

Background: Service as a form of social interaction

Anna Meroni, Assistant Professor of Service and Strategic Design at Politecnico di Milano, visited Aalto University on 10 September 2013 at Service Design Goes Public  seminar. Meroni’s main area of interest is social innovation considered in different areas of activity.  Meroni started  her key note speech by defining the disciplinary basis of Service Design, which consist of ethnography, social sciences, management, engineering, behavioral sciences and computing. She defined service as ”a regulated form of co-production of benefits between two or more parties, aiming at solving a certain problem through the application of knowledge and skills”.

Meroni highlighted that service results from an interaction and is a form of social interaction. Designers can create conditions under which these interactions and relationships can happen. Meroni presented four main areas of design interventions: Imagining future directions for service systems, Designing interactions to shape systems and organizations, Exploring new collaborative service models and Designing interactions, relations and experiences and eight main kinds of design contributions in these intervention areas.

AnnaMeroni

Three community-centered co-production cases 

In this blog post I concentrate on one of these interventions: “How to explore new collaborative service models”, with three case examples that Meroni presented.

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Service Design meets Futures Thinking #2

Oct29

A research based series of posts discussing the statement “Futures Research supports the Service Design process in multiple ways and throughout the whole process” by Minna Koskelo and Anu K. Nousiainen.

Part #2: Synergistic Principles of Service Design and Futures Research

We start our second blog post with where we left you in the first opening part of the series:

“Service Design and Futures Research ensure sustainable business, because they provide tools and processes for innovation through effective visual and anticipatory stories by means of co-creative research methods and iterative processes that nurture the unthinkable.”

We identified lots of synergies between the two disciplines as well as many areas where the fields supplement each other. While investigating selected literature and talking with experts, we faced also very similar vocabulary when discussing about the approach, principles, processes and tools of both Service Design and Futures Research. We created a table along the way to record our findings (see below). This blog post starts to unwrap the principles of Service Design and Futures Research which both aim at better futures and better business success. Continue reading →