1  Introduction

Daniela Sangiorgi

My work on Service Design started around the time the term was used in design studies (early 2000s), which shaped my interest in supporting the development of its foundations and research community, together with a growing number of scholars, particularly in Scandinavia, Italy and the UK. Since the beginning, my main sources have been the analogy with Interaction Design and Service Marketing, the concept of Product-Service System of Design for Sustainability, and the principles and practices of Participatory Design, contributing to the understanding of service interactions, service encounters, service systems and collaborative design approaches. My work period in the UK then (2007–15) increased my interest in the application of Service Design for the public sector, for new welfare models and healthcare (especially as I encountered the work of the RED Design Group of the Design Council), and the then nascent studies of the Experience Based Co-Design methodology. While bringing my attention to these sectors and fields of research, I became interested in the gradual evolution of Service Design applications towards systemic and transformational change, considering both organizations and larger complex service systems. In doing so, I started to find inspiration from the multidisciplinary fields of service research and service science, which have introduced fundamental theoretical frameworks and concepts that are still influencing Service Design research today.

In our initial conversations as co-editors to shape the basis for this publication, I reported ongoing research work on topics that are the natural evolution of this personal account: Service Design for the co-production and co-creation of public services (Sangiorgi et al. 2019; Sangiorgi et al. 2020a, 2020b, 2020c); Service Design for service system and service ecosystem transformation (Patricio et al. 2020; Koskela-Huotari et al. 2021); and Service Design for reflexivity and logic multiplicity (Sangiorgi et al. 2022; Cutroneo et al. 2022; Lu and Sangiorgi 2021).

The focus of this recent research mentioned above is on the complexity and strategies of designing for service systems and broader ecosystem transformation, with particular attention to the healthcare arena. A lever of transformation is associated with the introduction of new care paradigms such as co-production and recovery in the field of mental healthcare, where service users can contribute with their experiential knowledge in the co-design and co-delivery of services and where personal recovery journeys are counterposed to clinical recovery ones, focused on treatments and paternalistic modes of care. Associated with this paradigmatic shift is a community-based care model that requires changes at multiple levels, at the service interaction, service organization and then service ecosystem levels. Understanding how Service Design can foster these deeper paradigmatic changes in a care ecosystem led to reflections on the main dimensions of radical change in a service system and the importance of individual and collective reflexivity, particularly in contexts where actors are embedding multiple and often conflicting care logics.

This research represents a general evolution of Service Design toward a systemic turn (Koskela-Huotari and Vink 2022) and interest in new forms and practices of design that foster larger and longer-term transformations, including collective and collaborative design practices, that are challenged by engrained systems of policy and power and hidden sets of beliefs and values.

For this reason, I associated with systemic and collaborative change research work on the developing concept of service ecosystem design and its link with the notions of institutional logic and institutional work (Vink et al. 2021); the issue of participation and political power (Keshavarz and Mazé 2013; Trischler et al. 2019), the potential of infrastructuring and commons for societal change (Selloni 2017; Serravalli et al. 2017); the link between policy and futures (van Buuren et al. 2020); and the contemporary field of Transition Design (Irwin 2020). I also suggested that we consider work related to developing interpretations of Service Design, for example in relation to the importance of multidisciplinary approaches to Service Design (Yu 2020) and emergent new interpretations of design practice, such as autonomous design (Escobar 2018; Pierri 2019).

Lara de S. Penin

My interest in Service Design has been rooted in its potential to address social issues and build bridges between government, local institutions and the public. I have explored services as environmentally sustainable consumption practices such as Product-Service Systems (Vezzoli and Manzini 2000), collaborative or socially innovative community-oriented peer-to-peer services (Manzini 2015) and public services as tools for social equality (Cibrario and Weghmann 2021; Seery 2014). Having started my Service Design-related research as a PhD candidate at Milan Politecnico in the early 2000s, my work over the past fifteen-plus years has been based at the Parsons DESIS Lab in New York City.

A significant focus of my work has been identifying the essential conceptual and practical tools needed to practice Service Design effectively, particularly as I began teaching the field at Parsons, when it was then largely unknown in the United States. There were few books and resources on Service Design for teaching, so I developed materials bridging design, social sciences, strategy and management. I examined emerging Service Design consultancies like Livework and Engine, which at the time promoted their methods to establish a client base. In 2018, I published the textbook An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible (Penin 2018), mapping Service Design theory and practice for students through case studies and advocating for a transdisciplinary approach to designing services.

The early projects of Parsons DESIS Lab focused on community-based and socially innovative services, building on theories of social innovation (Manzini 2015) and relationality in services (Cipolla and Manzini 2009; Escobar et al. 2024). We recognized collaborative services (Jégou and Manzini 2008) and the peer-to-peer sharing economy (Tonkinwise 2014) as collective social practices rooted in local contexts. However, we also saw that these localized services could become burdensome for low-income communities, especially as neoliberal policies reduced government support and privatized commons.

We sought to connect bottom-up communities with public sector support, leading us to a series of projects in the 2010s exploring public governance and urban policy. The global rise of innovation labs in government, particularly in Europe (Pandelle et al. 2021), with MindLab (Bason 2016) and the UK (Durose et al. 2023), shaped debates on Service Design’s role in public service and policy (Parsons DESIS Lab 2020). We mobilized Participatory Design (Ehn 2012; Arnstein 2019) and co-design (McKercher 2020), contributing to what we called ‘civic Service Design’ and ‘policy design’. Recent engagement of our lab with affordable housing in Brazil has deepened my perspective on Service Design’s role in social justice (Collins et al. 2017), particularly in conceptualizing housing as a service linked to urbanism and policy.

I have also been influenced by social justice frameworks in design and technology (Haraway 1988; Costanza-Chock 2020), feminist perspectives on labour (Weeks 2011), Social Reproductive Labour (Bhattacharya 2022) and design and data feminism (Criado Perez 2019; D’Ignazio and Klein 2020). Racial justice movements provide historical perspectives on Black Americans mobilizing to provide services for their communities (Hilliard 2008), alongside key concepts like intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991) and systemic injustices anchored in racial inequalities (Ahmed 2007). These references motivate my advocacy for greater diversity in Service Design and the expansion of critical perspectives within the field.

More recently, my work has centred on social justice issues and their intersections with services. The transformation of service labour through digital platforms and the heightened visibility of service workers during Covid-19 highlighted these challenges. Traditional Service Design tools, such as service blueprints, inadequately represent service workers’ experiences (Akama et al. 2023) and worse, tend to invisibilize or erase their experiences and contribute to the further erosion of labour rights.

The issue of service work has gained centrality in my research as digital platforms and gig work become increasingly prevalent. The service worker perspective has been overlooked, prompting me to engage with sociologists of work (Smith 2013), foundational studies on emotional labour (Hochschild 2012) and historical service–work relations (Kim 2018). Together, these influences drive Service Design toward a critical/political turn, unveiling its deeper potential beyond pre-packaged toolkits and emphasizing its transformative possibilities. This has inspired the inclusion of topics that reflect Service Design’s evolving role in tackling systemic inequalities, reimagining tools and fostering cross-disciplinary approaches to amplify its societal relevance.

Alison Prendiville

My introduction to Service Design arose via service management with my early design research on an EU Framework IV project – MIMIC (Modality, Inter-modality and Interchange) looking at the seamless journey; in parallel, my PhD explored the specification of revenue collection systems in urban mass transit system and the need for a service perspective to deliver more effective solutions for users and operators.

In the past thirteen years, my work has been heavily influenced by anthropology (Ingold and Palsson 2013; Gunn et al. 2020; Napier et al. 2014) and the role of co-design as a reflexive and embodied process of discovery and actualization through lived experiences (Akama and Prendiville 2013). Whilst working with the elderly on social care projects for local government in the UK, the relational aspects of Service Design came to the fore through co-design’s ability to build trust and understanding of how temporalities and place are lived and experienced (Prendiville 2015). Similarly, through anthropology, my work has exposed me to better understand the knowledgeability that exists in different cultural and historical contexts and how easy it is for Western epistemologies to ignore the often invisible and implicit local histories and knowledge that makes place (Appadurai 1986), whilst frequently imposing potentially inappropriate service solutions (Tunstall 2023; Escobar 2018). This means I see Service Design’s role as offering ways of amplifying local knowledge that is intrinsic to the values of a community (Prendiville 2018), as well creating culturally sensitive and meaningful solutions through critical and reflexive co-design tools (Prendiville et al. 2024).

Because my educational background bridges both science and the humanities, I have always been keen to explore the relationships between different disciplinary perspectives such as the biological and the humanities rather than treating them in isolation or pitching them in opposition (Ingold and Palsson 2013; Seeberg et al. 2020). It is in these exchanges through Service Design that synergies can be found that allow for a view of the world that operates at different scales and entanglements. Thus, with this connection, particularly with the biological sciences, my work transcends disciplinary boundaries and focuses on incorporating socially responsive co-design processes, to integrate scientific knowledge in culturally sensitive ways in the areas of human and animal health systems.

For the past nine years, my Service Design work has predominantly focused on the global health challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in UK nursing practices (Prendiville et al. 2022), the development of diagnostics in human and animal health settings in India (Greru et al. 2022), under a One-Health approach, and most recently, investigating blood culture pathways in three NHS hospitals. For each of these diverse service settings, AMR’s entanglement with the environment and human and animal contexts, is nested in fractured complex systems, with different ontologies, offering Service Design opportunities to explore new systemic ways of working and developing innovative practices. It is in this nested complexity of AMR that my work operates at many different levels, connecting cultural practices, technologies and policies through co-design. Yet it is also through these encounters that I have been motivated to question Western dominant epistemologies of health and to look at Service Design’s contribution to bridging the divide between the biomedical and alternative knowledge systems.

1.2   GATHERING ADVICE FROM OTHER SCHOLARS AND PRACTITIONERS

As a further step in building the handbook content and structure, we reached out to key scholars, representing both dominant and emergent Service Design research, as well as representatives of transversal research issues and fields (e.g. digital and design anthropology, feminist studies, cultural studies) and design practitioners.1 As a result of these preliminary conversations, some key transversal themes came to our attention:

• Cultural diversity and plurality in Service Design that requires acknowledging different service and design cultures beyond North American- and European-dominant perspectives (e.g. Akama and Yee 2024) and the related studies on ‘decolonizing Service Design’ (e.g. Ansari 2019) or the notion of ‘autonomous design’ (e.g. Escobar 2018; Pierri 2017, 2019).2
• Smart services and digital service systems, a topic that studies and reflects on the implications for Service Design and service research of technological mediation (e.g. Čaić et al. 2018; Gonçalves et al. 2020; Funk et al. 2018; Verbeek 2006) and the current implications for design practice of accelerating data science and artificial intelligence (e.g. Hernández-Ramírez and Ferreira 2024).
• Scaling and systemic change, that brings attention to the growing interest in relating Service Design with systemic design (van der Bijl-Brouwer 2022), service ecosystem transformation (e.g. Koskela-Huotari et al. 2021), transition design (e.g. Irwin 2020) or market shaping (e.g. Thompson et al. 2018).
• Politics and policy, in their relations to services and design, and their reciprocal influences. This can mean discussing the politics of services and designing as political (e.g. Agid and Austin 2023), as well as the potential role and practices of designing for policy (e.g. Kimbell et al. 2023; Bailey 2021).
• Critical perspectives on participation in Service Design, considering the importance of acknowledging power dynamics in complex systems (e.g. Farr 2018), the level of authenticity of participation (e.g. Raman and French 2021) and the practices that support those (Trischler et al. 2019).
• Design for and amidst uncertainty that considers both the interest in the theories and practices of speculative design (e.g. Lin and Villari 2022) as well as the implications and strategies used when designing in a time of deep uncertainty (e.g. Broadbent and Ferraris 2024).
• Alternative forms of economy and service work that can draw focus toward more sustainable and equitable practices (e.g. platform cooperativism, solidarity economy) and critical perspectives in Service Design that consider the well-being of service employees while designing for service innovation (e.g. Vignoli et al. 2021).
• New methodologies and paradigms in and for Service Design that open up spaces to innovate Service Design practice, for example introducing forms of theatre, narrative psychology or design anthropology, or studies adopting theoretical frames and paradigms that can inform or challenge the Service Design field (e.g. feminist theories to inform design justice, or pragmatism for grounded design research methodologies).

We augmented these topics with the ones that emerged during the ServDes2020 Conference, which was held for the first time outside Europe in the Asia-Pacific region. The scope of the conference, in its multiple physical and online formats, was specifically designed ‘to focus and reflect on the tensions and paradoxes of undertaking Service Design in contexts of plurality – cultural, economic, historical and environmental – in ways that privilege difference and diversity’.3 Acknowledging and enabling plurality was widely debated and variously interpreted in terms of, for example, designing among a plurality of voices,4 multiple worldviews or logics,5 values,6 cultures (Duan et al. [2020] 2021), Indigenous knowledge forms (West 2021), life forms (Greru and Prendiville 2021) and minority experiences (Balezdrova et al. 2021). These and other contributions brought attention to overarching themes of ethics, politics, power, participation and equity in Service Design.

With this rich set of inputs, we started to identify possible keywords, thematic clusters, principles and an overarching possible handbook structure (see Figure 1.1.1). The resulting book handbook aims to offer insights, orienting theories and tools to address contemporary global challenges; integrate diverse and contemporary debates in design; balance contributions from different geographies, agendas and contexts, as well as from both professionals and scholars; and finally, welcome different styles of writing, such as storytelling, vignettes, conversations or interviews.

In the next paragraph, we introduce the resulting Handbook of Service Design structure and give an overview of the content of the book’s five main sections.

1.3   HANDBOOK STRUCTURE AND SUMMARY

Drawing on a diverse community of service and design-related thinkers and practitioners, the resulting Handbook of Service Design is a timely and critical review of the themes and intersecting disciplines that are questioning and opening up the field towards plural perspectives, showing its complexity, exposing its challenges and offering practical examples and directions.

The handbook is organized into five main sections that introduce new ways of seeing services and design, introduce a plurality of themes and frameworks that develop critical agendas for Service Design, contextualize services within their wider systems, offer novel Service Design practices and approaches and discuss future opportunities. Below, we briefly summarize the content of each section, saving more precise accounts of the contributing chapters for the short introductions that appear at the beginning of each section.

Section 2:   Plural Services and Design Cosmologies

The selected chapters explore critical perspectives on services and Service Design, challenging dominant paradigms and advocating for a more plural, ethical and equitable Service Design practice. The authors in Chapter 2.1, Alison Prendiville, Nipun Garodia and Adam Drazin, argue for the need to embrace diverse knowledge forms as a way to overcome the divide between Western rationalism and indigenous epistemologies in Service Design; the authors of Chapter 2.2, Miso Kim and Michael Arnold Mages, frame and analyse services as ‘collective conversations’ that can manifest in different historical and cultural patterns, auspicating for deliberative conversations that rehumanize and revive personal relations; the authors of Chapter 2.3, Josina Vink, Vanessa Rodrigues, Åsa Wikberg Nilsson and Ahmed Ansari, drawing from Black feminist scholarship, reflect on the importance of meaningful engagement and reflexivity in Service Design as a way to avoid reproducing intersecting systems of oppression; the authors in Chapter 2.4, Yoko Akama, Tristan Schultz and Ricardo Sosa, call for decolonizing Service Design and its neoliberal foundations, recognizing one’s positionality and embracing learning from Indigenous, transcultural and local practices; finally, the authors in Chapter 2.5, Stefan Holmlid, Martina Čaić, and Elina Jaakkola, discuss opportunities for interdisciplinary synergies between Service Design and service research using the metaphors of ‘overlaps’, ‘intersections’ and ‘narratives’.

Section 3:   A Critical Agenda for Service Design

The chapters of Section 3 critically examine issues of justice, labour, participation, feminism and uncertainty in Service Design, highlighting structural inequalities and proposing alternative approaches, frameworks and research agendas. In particular, the authors of Chapter 3.1, Lesley-Ann Noel, Gina Fernandes and Robert B. Whiteside, explore systemic injustices in public services, arguing for a justice-oriented Service Design framework that prioritizes the voices and needs of marginalized communities. The authors in Chapter 3.2, Lara de S. Penin and Rashid Owoyele, focus on service workers, advocating for a worker-centred approach that recognizes workers as active participants, critiques exploitative labour conditions and promotes cooperative governance models. The authors of Chapter 3.3, Shana Agid, Myriam D. Diatta and Jakob Trischler, challenge the neutrality of participatory design, proposing a more transformative approach that acknowledges systemic inequalities and prioritizes genuine community engagement. The author of Chapter 3.4, Daniella Jenkins, applies feminist theory to Service Design, particularly through the lens of social reproduction, offering an alternative Service Design framework that address systemic exclusions. Finally, the authors in Chapter 3.5, Aguinaldo dos Santos, Ricardo Martins, Mari Suoheimo and Jaewoo Joo, consider the growing impact of climate change, health crises and geopolitical instability, proposing frameworks for understanding uncertainty and developing resilience-building strategies.

Section 4:   Contextualizing Services, Systems and Change

The five chapters of Section 4 explore the evolving role of Service Design across business, governance, social change and education, advocating for a more integrated and systemic approach. In Chapter 4.1, Ingo Oswald Karpen and Ileana Stigliani argue that businesses struggle with fragmented design disciplines such as Service Design, strategic design and human-centred design. They propose an ‘umbrella paradigm’ called Design for Business, unifying common and fundamental principles. The authors in Chapter 4.2, Daniela Sangiorgi, Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer, Lia Patrício and Jennie Winhall, examine how service and systemic design can converge to drive service system transformation. Using micro, meso and macro analytical lenses, the authors highlight key areas for intervention – design agency, emergence and vision for change – to reinforce the systemic nature of Service Design. The authors in Chapter 4.3, Sabine Junginger and Michael Kost, explore trust and proximity in collaborations between academic researchers and civil servants. Using a Swiss local government partnership as a case study, they discuss how reshaping roles, expectations and engagement methods can foster sustainable relationships and strengthen public institutions through design-based interventions. In Chapter 4.4, Thomas Markussen, Daniela Selloni and Joyce Yee investigate how Service Design intersects with social change, comparing different approaches to social innovation and different forms of sociotechnical transitions. In a final discussion, this theoretical review is debated using examples from ongoing research and design practice. Lastly, the authors in Chapter 4.5, Nicola Morelli, Amalia de Götzen and Luca Simeone, call for a paradigm shift in Service Design education towards a politically engaged, community-based model. They highlight the potential of embedding students in real-world contexts, adopting an insider positioning that can significantly transform Service Design education principles, practices, approaches and methods.

Section 5:   Developing Service Design Practices and Approaches

These seven chapters explore emerging perspectives and approaches in Service Design that can aid practitioners to address issues of power, identity, digital transformation, inclusivity and systemic change. In particular, the authors in Chapter 5.1, Frederick M. C. van Amstel and Fernando Secomandi, question service interfaces that reinforce social oppression, using the Theatre of the Oppressed to highlight inequalities in digital services. They call for rehumanizing design practices that challenge systemic hierarchies. In Chapter 5.2, Manuela Aguirre Ulloa, Florencia Adriasola, Gianncarlo Durán and Andrés Ortega examine power dynamics in complex facilitation settings, using the Chilean government’s Experimenta programme as a case study. The authors emphasize the importance of transparency, participatory approaches and critical reflexivity in navigating institutional inequalities. The authors in Chapter 5.3, Sloan Leo Cowan with Mari Nakano, challenge conventional human-centred design by advocating for queerness as a radical, care-centred approach. They propose designing by communities rather than for them, fostering ambiguity, agency and relational engagement over transactional efficiency. In Chapter 5.4, Carla Cipolla, Alice Devecchi and Luis Alt explore how Service Design can foster meaningful human connections. Drawing on Martin Buber and Edith Stein, the authors advocate for dialogical empathy, shifting services from transactional exchanges to transformative inclusive encounters. The authors in Chapter 5.5, Juan Sanin and Melisa Duque, describe ethnography as a method to capture lived service experiences. They present vignettes illustrating how people adapt and shape services, emphasizing the value of improvisation, co-creation, and situated knowledge over rigid design processes. In Chapter 5.6, Roberta Tassi and Serena Talento analyse organizational change through Service Design, analysing case studies where designers facilitate cultural and technological shifts. They stress adaptability, interdisciplinary collaboration and human-centred approaches in digital transformation effort. Finally, in Chapter 5.7, John A. Bruce, Francesca Piredda and Janna DeVylder discuss traditional service mapping, advocating for richer storytelling techniques to reveal hidden service dynamics, challenge biases and envision alternative service futures.

Section 6:   Building Futures

This final section of the Handbook presents a multifaceted exploration of future-oriented Service Design through five interconnected chapters. In particular, the authors in Chapter 6.1, Elizaveta (Lee) Kravchenko and Laura Forlano, introduce ‘Speculative Services’ by employing speculative vignettes generated with ChatGPT and immersive Virtual Reality (VR) experiences. Their work focuses on critical technology literacy, exploring how emerging technologies might reshape areas such as elderly care and customer interactions. Grounding their approach in Science and Technology Studies (STS), they challenge the deterministic narratives of technology and encourage designers to envision alternative futures that address ethical considerations and social inequalities. In Chapter 6.2, Marc Brightman, Ralitsa Diana Debrah and Francesco Cara broaden the discussion by integrating non-human perspectives into design. In the context of the Anthropocene and ongoing environmental degradation, the authors advocate for the inclusion of indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge. They argue for Service Design practices that transcend the conventional human-centric paradigm, fostering sustainability and a more inclusive approach that honours both human and non-human stakeholders. The authors in Chapter 6.3, Cameron Tonkinwise and Lucy Kimbell, instead engage in a political dialogue about designing government services. Their conversation highlights the challenges inherent in public Service Design, particularly the risk of reducing citizens to mere customers. They call for a critical and democratic approach that promotes genuine participation, respects citizen dignity and dismantles existing power structures within government systems. In Chapter 6.4, Stefana Broadbent examines the perils of designing for dehumanizing futures in a world increasingly governed by AI and automation. She underscores the dangers of diminishing human agency and advocates for ethical, regulatory and humane design frameworks to safeguard individual identity and privacy. Finally, in Chapter 6.5, Julia Schaeper and Glenn Robert propose ‘Commoning for a Regenerative World’. They challenge neoliberal economic models by championing commoning practices and degrowth economics to promote collective well-being, environmental sustainability and a radical rethinking of Service Design.