Connectivity Through Service Design

Service Design’s emergence as a new field of design at the end of the twentieth century, and its ongoing evolution into an interdisciplinary, col laborative and holistic field of design, is not easily definable. Equally, its origins cannot be attributed to developments within one design discipline, nor can it be viewed, unlike its more traditional counterparts of graphic and product design, as a cle arly bounded design practice. Service Design’s arrival at the start of the Millennium is shaped by its intrinsic human - centred approach and the unique nature of services that are irrevocably entangled in a socio - technical and political landscape. In this chapter I explore the different paths that led to Service Design, from both practice and research perspectives, with the aim of showing how its origins and future directions are interlinked.

About the book:
Since the 1990s, in response to dramatic transformations in the worlds of technology and the economy, design - a once relatively definable discipline, complete with a set of sub-disciplines - has become unrecognizable. Consequently, design scholars have begun to address new issues, themes and sub-disciplines such as: sustainable design, design for well-being, empathic design, design activism, design anthropology, and many more. The Routledge Companion to Design Studies charts this new expanded spectrum and embraces the wide range of scholarship relating to design - theoretical, practice-related and historical - that has emerged over the last four decades.

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