Designing Sustainable Services for Cities: Adopting a Systemic Perspective in Service Design Experiments

Abstract

Cities provide a privileged context for observing environmental, social, political, and economic changes. They offer great opportunities for experimentation, often becoming laboratories for innovative practices in different fields of research. This article describes how Service Design can concretely contribute to promoting sustainable and inclusive services at the city level by adopting participatory, collaborative, and multi-stakeholder processes. In particular, the article analyses, through a literature review, the evolution of service design applied to complex and large-scale systems, identifying in the recent conceptualization of service ecosystem design the framework for designing sustainable and inclusive solutions in urban contexts. Two design studies were developed through a collaborative design process to link theory and practice. Three examples of service concepts are described as experiments in transformative service design practices that incorporate systems thinking. The article explains how service designers can deal with complex and large-scale transformations in terms of sustainable urban services and outlines a service design process and some design and research implications related to the ability to adapt to uncertainty and incorporate complexity as design elements.

A Review of Service Design Pedagogy to Identify Potential Added Value to Product Innovation in Higher Education

“…Similarly, Kim et al [26] suggested approaches for designing services from the perspective of eco-driving service design using behavioral data on bus drivers. Villari [27] also implemented eco-service design (ECO-SD) methods that integrate eco-design and service design toward sustainable services.…”

Exploring the Systemic and Speculative dimensions into Service Design

“…During the development path of Service Design, it can be seen that Service Design already introduced some systemic perspective (e.g., Darzentas & Darzentas, 2014;Manzini et al, 2001;Sangiorgi & Pacenti, 2010;van der Bijl-Brouwer, 2017;Yulia & Roberta, 2018) and emphasized its role in the service systems transformation (e.g., Koskela-Huotari et al, 2021;Patrício et al, 2020;Villari, 2022). However, it is essential to recognize that with the rapid development of the world, Service Design is facing increasingly significant complexity and large-scale problems brought about by the dynamic changes inside and outside the service systems, multi-actor dynamic interaction, and interdependence challenges in its environment (Dorst, 2015;Manzini, 2011;Villari, 2022;Vink, 2021). The interconnectedness of things brings complexity, so systems must be viewed holistically to identify effective leverage points and further foster systemic transformation (Meadows, 2008;Sevaldson, 2009).…”