A Design Anthropology of Place in Service Design: A Methodological Reflection

This paper proposes adopting a Design Anthropology perspective when considering the design of community based services for the elderly. Drawing on two service design projects located in the Byker area of Newcastle, which brought together Ordnance Survey, Age UK Newcastle and a service design Post Graduate Masters programme, this perspective utilises anthropology’s ethnographic method and a specific anthropological theory, to expand service design discourses and reframe the importance of place and place making in the design of community services. In particular, the paper takes the work of Ingold and a phenomenological perspective to explore notions of life as lived to reveal alternative conceptual frames that can often be overlooked in service design. These methods and concepts adopted from anthropology both reveal and theorise the messiness of everyday life. The work goes on to examine the challenges of commensurating these community practices, with the values that the research revealed and to integrate them into viable services of the elderly.