Embodying, enacting and entangling design: A phenomenological view to co-designing services

Abstract

What is holding back service design from making a distinct departure from a product-centred to a socio-material human-centred framework? We have a concern for co-designing that is often discussed as a generic method to develop empathetic connections and understandings of people and their contexts. In this use, mastering the craft of co-designing had inadvertently isolated the method from the practitioner, fragmenting its process as a series of static events or a tool for deployment in staged workshops. Contributing to current debates on co-designing and design anthropology, our paper seeks to re-entangle co-designing back into its lived and enacted contexts. We see co-designing as a reflexive, embodied process of discovery and actualisation, and it is an integral, on-going activity of designing services. Co-designing can catalyse a transformative process in revealing and unlocking tacit knowledge, moving people along on a journey to 'make real' what proposed services might be like in the future. Co-designing plays a critical role especially when it involves the very people who are enmeshed in the realisation of the proposed services itself. As such, our case study of a weekend Ordnance Survey Geovation camp pays closer attention to how this took place and discusses the transformative process that was central to it. By taking a phenomenological perspective and building on a seminal anthropologists' work, Tim Ingold, our paper counters the limitations in service design that tends to see its process as a contained series of fixed interactions or systemized process of methods. Through Ingold, we see 'the social world as a tangle of threads or life-paths, ever ravelling here and unravelling there, within which the task for any being is to improvise a way through, and to keep on-going. Lives are bound up in the tangle.' Similarly, we view co-designing as being and becoming, that is constantly transforming and connecting multiple entanglements.

The Promise of Co‐Design for Public Policy

“…:15) and of tacit knowledge that is ingrained in people's everyday experiences. Methods such as diaries, collages, card sorts, model building, and various forms of mapping and roleplaying can help to reveal knowledge that is non‐verbal, holistic, non‐linear, emotional, or intuitive, and which may not be uncovered by other methods (Akama and Prendiville :31–34; Sanders ). This is different from deliberative approaches to policy making, which focus on telling, and include very little enacting or making.…”

“…; Sanoff ). By bringing diverse people together and helping them to forge meaningful connections, co‐design has contributed to creating social relations (Akama and Prendiville :34) and building social capital (Bradwell and Marr :10). Effective facilitation of co‐design and trusted relationships between participants and facilitators can lead to a constructive, action‐oriented, and future‐focused dialogue to develop new policy directions (Howell and Wilkinson :162–164).…”

“…Effective facilitation of co‐design and trusted relationships between participants and facilitators can lead to a constructive, action‐oriented, and future‐focused dialogue to develop new policy directions (Howell and Wilkinson :162–164). It may even transform participants through the emotional and social connections they make (Akama and Prendiville :37–38). It is unclear to what extent these benefits are achieved in practice, if at all, beyond the individual case studies discussed in the literature.…”

“…It is questionable whether co‐design can even be scaled up in this way. Design researchers Akama and Prendiville (:37), for instance, argue that co‐design ‘needs to be firmly rooted in its location, time and people’ so that it can progress ‘organically from rich engagements and deep interactions over time’. Recent research on public sector innovation labs that take a design‐led approach has similarly suggested that they may be better suited to ‘singular programs, projects or services’ as they struggle with ‘higher level policy change’ (Tonurist et al.…”

Using an action research approach to embed service design in a higher education institution

“…Open to change Akama and Prendiville (2013) articulate that co-designing is not just collaborating using a set of tools and techniques but about an openness to take-on all the in-fluences, challenges, fears and risks that come with a change project in a cultur-ally stuck organisation. They argue that design researchers have a responsibility to tell the 'swampy' (Schön, 1983) stories of what really happens when trying to change and design existing services.…”