Designing for the Level of ‘Service as Systemic Institutions’

Abstract

Every action is framed in a broader landscape dominated by a system of values, rules, and cultural, social and political premises. In this landscape, change is slow, evolutionary, and lies outside the control of a designer. Nevertheless, designers can play a role in triggering change and possibly steer it in preferred directions. This chapter illustrates the design capabilities that are most relevant for design action at this level. Every action that produces change occurs in an institutional landscape. By 'institutional landscape', we mean the system of values, rules, and social, cultural, economic and political premises that frame the change and facilitate the changes that are consistent with this framework, while hindering those that are not (Koskela-Huotari and Vargo 2016; Vargo and Lusch 2015). It is easy to imagine that, like natural landscapes, the institutional landscape may seem static or changing very slowly. Change and innovation at this level happens by slow and evolutionary movements influenced by several factors, including, but not limited to, human action. For instance, the institutional landscape is influenced by changes in institutional settings, such as cultural, scientific and technical knowledge, politics and social trends. Human action, and consequently design action, is therefore unlikely to produce direct and controllable institutional changes. Nevertheless, human action can still influence such changes, as shown by several examples of purposeful social constructions aimed at influencing this level. This is the case, for example, of healthcare reforms such as the welfare state reform in UK 1 or Obamacare in United States, 2 the Australia tax reform (Terrey 2012), the construction of the American electricity system (Bijker 1995), or the psychiatric reform in Italy (Manzini 2015). It is worth noticing that, besides the Australian Tax Reform,