Beyond simply use, desire, memory, and emotions are also important considerations that affect a user’s interactions with designed things.

Rather than discrete solutions, a strategic design approach works within large-scale systems to identify solutions in areas such as healthcare, education, and climate change

By understanding how such processes work, we might redesign or even “undesign” unsustainable products, systems, and practices and redirect efforts toward a desirable future.

Designing Product Service Systems (PSS), comprising a mix of tangible things and intangible systems and services, has inaugurated a shift for designers. Rather than designing singular things to fulfil a particular need, a fundamental design question is asking what the “value-in-use” to customers is and, ultimately, what they actually need.

But we still tend to envisage systems as closed. That is, to really begin thinking systematically, we need to consider how one system interacts with other systems.

Another key service term is “touchpoints.” Typically, these are points of interaction between consumers and the company.

Importantly, social design aims to benefit people, but includes the end users in designing solutions. As opposed to the fast-paced, designer-driven hackathon model, social design typically involves a slower, inclusive process that creates a platform for community input and collaboration.

Whether we like it or not, service design of the future may require everyone to be a designer. But, while Manzini argues that everyone is potentially a designer, our innate design capacity “must be stimulated and cultivated.” Education clearly plays a role in this, but so does the kind of participation and co-creation engendered by social design. p94

service departments without any cohesion or consistency, often resulting in frustration for citizens. To start a new business, for example, may involve dealing with three or four separate government departments for the appropriate applications, permits, and permissions, all of them designed differently. Service design within government not only aims to provide citizens with more efficient and universal access to services, but can also save resources for governments too.

Given governments are usually the largest providers of services in any country, how they are designed impacts millions of people, so that even slight changes may require careful research, analysis, and redesign. And the last problem for designers working within government is the fact that services are constantly changing due to not only changes in technology, but also changes in government policy that may increase or decrease resources available for certain services.

A systemic approach to design considers discrete products within larger systems

A new discipline “service design” is devoted to designing better services

Social design encourages user participation and co-creation in the design process

Governments, the biggest providers of services, are increasingly turning to design

Designers attentive to user experiences typically engage in research to determine not only how designed things enable people to perform useful functions, but also how they affect users’ emotions. In order to better understand users, the usual design practices of prototyping, iteration, and user scenarios are supplemented by interviews, surveys, diary studies, and lab-based research in collaboration with psychologists, sociologists, or anthropologists.

to find information on a new website, our emotional response to designed things is an essential facet of any product, system, or service. And, although designers often strive for innovative solutions, radical disruptions may not be as successful for users as gradual, incremental changes.

His MAYA, or “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable” principle, proposed that the new product with the best prospects for success was novel yet still recognizable to the public.1 Designers should aim for a balance between novelty and familiarity, so that a new product should not be so novel that consumers could not comprehend what it was or how it worked. Ultimately, MAYA implied gradual changes could ease user’s fear of the new yet still stimulate curiosity.

TV series use a similar strategy with ongoing franchises, spin-off series, and sequels. In some instances, rather than form, form follows familiarity.

Radical change can lead to frustration, as users expect to quickly adapt to a new version rather than spend hours learning a new interface, commands, or structure.

First, an aesthetic response based on a user’s sensory perception of a product (its look, feel, or sound); second, its functional value based on which actions it affords and how it is operated; and last, the expressive, symbolic, or mythological associations people have with a product. They also note that the context in which our interactions take place is important—the atmosphere of the environment in which our interaction occurs can impact on our experience.

One of the essential issues in considering emotional responses and experiences is that they are, by definition, subjective. Not only will every person experience products and situations differently, but experiences are also different according to gender, age, education, cultural, and social background.

consultation in designing public spaces and infrastructure. The idea that the public should have an active role in planning decisions has been a recurring refrain since the 1960s.

First, users do not always know what the problems are or the best ways to fix them.
Designers need to function as facilitators as much as creators. This may require a significant amount of translation between users or groups.
Co-design or co-creation, like participatory design, requires some relinquishing of control of design and development to users. It also requires thinking of users as active participants rather than passive consumers. Although the designer’s role could potentially be diminished within this model, designers still play a critical role due to their visual thinking and research skills.

he designers’ role as closer to a facilitator rather than a creator. This would require a significant shift in design education and professional practice, but there are signs that such a shift is already underway.
A final new approach, based on combining user-centered and participatory design ideas, is the living lab.

Today, designers and activists working to decolonize design are questioning the foundations of much contemporary design practice and thinking.14 The knowledge systems, categories, definitions, and standards of professional design are typically framed as Euro-American and white.

Ideally, experience design actively encourages participation, and interaction is central to its success. Pre-created content passively viewed or consumed by visitors does not make for engaging or compelling experiences. As well as the other aspects of design already covered in previous chapters, it is worth stressing that designed experiences involve a narrative aspect— actions unfold over time and are linked via some kind of story. While designers can map these narratives, as in the case of Disney, they should ideally also leave space for visitors’ improvisation and creative capacity. In this way, designing experiences draws upon ideas derived from theater, film, and video games as much as traditional design fields. Importantly, experiences need not be simply entertaining, but can be instructive, informative, and inspiring.

Participatory and co-design strategies are essential new approaches for designers

Designers are starting to acknowledge the limitations of universal solutions

Creating compelling experiences for all is a fundamentally interdisciplinary pursuit

As well as how things work, designers consider how things make us feel

Designed products, systems, and services can include or exclude

Design is starting to appear into executive boardrooms, high-level government and public service offices, and into non-government and community organizations, to contribute to the foundations of decision-making. At this highest level, designers are not creating tangible things, services or experiences, but proposing strategic solutions to large-scale problems.

Iteration of ideas, incorporating end users, and working across knowledge silos—for global corporations and governments. For leaders and managers, strategic design provides an alternative means to see the big picture, consider all aspects of a complex problem, and implement solutions for change and long-term sustainability. Designers engaged with large-scale challenges, such as in healthcare, education, or environmental sustainability, are increasingly dealing with interlinked networks of systems and services, and proposing transformation at a systemic level.

Living Labs, for example, are one realm for experimentation and testing scenarios that can be easily changed and refined before design solutions are rolled out to the general public. Design’s role in social- and community-based innovation on a strategic level involves considering the designer’s role as initiator, facilitator, and communicator, in which designers might help shape, envisage, and implement solutions that can empower individuals and communities. Importantly, individuals and communities need to be included within the design process to have any long-term impact.

One of the underlying premises of strategic design is that it can stimulate innovation, and it is promoted as a catalyst for transformation of an organization, corporation, or government.

Indeed, if strategic design involves redesigning an organization, or larger scale integration of products, services, or stakeholder inputs, then it seems closer to management than traditional design. And if it includes dealing with various institutions, administrations, and bureaucracies in addressing interconnected systems of people, services, systems, and infrastructure, then the remit of the strategic designer begins to sound more like a CEO or president. p129

Particularly in Scandinavia and England, design has been recognized as a valuable contribution within governments, with designers involved in shaping policy for complex problems from childhood obesity to affordable housing and effecting change by improving public service provisions.

The oversimplification of empathy for users is another limitation, with user workshops or observations completed in a few hours, resulting in superficial understandings. With little time allocated for in-depth research, design thinking can fail to meet its goal of designing a user-centered experience. Empathy and understanding for users typically take a long time, as does building partnerships that enable participation or co-creation.

Design methods can be applied to complex organizational problems

Designers are increasingly working on strategic levels to address large-scale issues

Governments are turning to design to aid policy development

Design is typically understood as a unique approach to problem-solving

Within the business world, design thinking has shifted the popular perception of design

our future in fundamental ways. In a sense, design has contributed to both the best and worst aspects of our world, so it deserves both serious consideration and serious rethinking.

Anthropocene promises instability and dramatic change.
The Anthropocene also implies thinking in longer time frames: beyond accounting for every minute, maximizing short-term profits or comforts, it requires thinking about the long-term future. Although such scales are hard to connect to seemingly small design decisions, the cumulative effects of using aerosols or plastics, for example, or choosing less materials or none at all, makes a difference.

Rather than rely on individual ownership, sharing service schemes underline the ideas of using resources and energy more efficiently and using material things only when we need them.

A further radical position involves efforts to redesign humans in order to adapt to a changing planet and scarce resources. In the twenty-first century, resilience, flexibility, and adaptation may prove more useful design principles than standardization, form, and function. p143

New technologies are stacked onto existing systems—so that the iPhone, for example, required the existing internet and its established protocols.

Consequently, it is difficult to measure how much energy and materials are actually used to create and sustain digital design outcomes. Data generation, gathering, and analysis are either hidden, opaque, or too complex for non-specialists—including most designers—to understand.

The power of social media to design our identity. Within only a decade, users of Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, WhatsApp, LinkedIn...

Researchers recently found that their AI “amplified predictable gender biases found in the photos – going so far as to categorize a man standing next to a stove as a woman.” Such amplification of existing stereotypes confirms the need for a greater understanding of these technologies before they are deployed into our designed services and experiences

indigenous design is not simply adapting some skills or acknowledging a presence, but involves a deeper understanding of indigenous knowledge and alternative world-views. This includes alternative concepts of social life, and human relationships to the environment and the cosmos. On the one hand, this is an essential part of decolonizing design

A further problem in considering such complex issues is how to construct a design language that is genuinely global and universally understood. The past two hundred and fifty years of design discourse was dominated overwhelmingly by designers, critics, and writers from Europe and America, necessarily marginalizing other perspectives

Considering design from an indigenous perspective or within alternative cultures or economies can provide alternative future possibilities.

The rise of design activism, in which design processes are not characterized as a service by professional designers for clients but as pro- active interventions or “disruptive” and self-consciously political activities.8 At their best, such projects force us to imagine various futures—utopian or dystopian—and help us re-envisage our concepts of technology, science, or social relations.

Future designers and critics must engage with design’s ethical, cultural, economic, and political dimensions if they are to make a genuinely sustainable contribution. The preceding chapters focused not only on the outcomes of design and the skills or processes that produced them, but also on the planning, reflection, and thinking that precedes that action.