Montag, 22. Februar 2010, 14:00-16:00
Raum 1118/19, 11. OG, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Erst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587 Berlin
*** Research Colloquium Usability ***
Benedict Singleton, an artist and writer, is currently in the final stages of a PhD in design at Northumbria University, UK. His recent work deals with the construction of new institutions, and has been presented in the UK, US, Sweden, Italy and Korea. He also works commercially, and as an independent consultant has been involved in designing large-scale services for, amongst others, News International, Marie Stopes, and the UK’s National Health Service.
On Services: Culture Engines, Habit Traps and Fields of Flesh
Service design is more talked about than practiced, and the talk is a mixture of hands-on savvy with big-hearted polemics: methodological ‘toolkits’ and ruminations on ‘design thinking’ converge with - rather sketchy - promises of ‘community’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘wellbeing’. The four-year research programme I’ll be talking about takes a very different position on a field whose wide and rapid emergence is as surprising as the speed with which it has generated its own orthodoxy.
If a service is an act that benefits someone else, its design is an attempt to give human co-operation a particular shape: service design hacks the social in an effort to choreograph it. Services produce roles, habits, expectations, opportunities, etiquette, body postures, wealth, poverty, and political positions. Design's role in this production is not a priori ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, but complex, inevitable, powerfully charged, always questionable and never to be rushed into.
This research locates an alternative practice of service design at the intersection of historical attempts to push design ‘beyond the object‘ with recent forays into new political terrain stirred up across a range of disciplines. It attempts to unlock a role for service design as a medium of experimentation with new institutional forms. In the course of this talk, we will cross paths with the relationship between distributed organisations and all-out war, puzzle over whether a pregnant woman can be said to provide a service to her unborn child, outline tendencies of commercial design research we must strictly speaking call 'criminal' and 'surreal', think about how biotech challenges how we understand what ‘working for a living’ means and how we understand human habits... that is, in general, consider means of (re)starting conversation about what service design is, does, might be and could do.
Raum 1118/19, 11. OG, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, Erst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587 Berlin
*** Research Colloquium Usability ***
Benedict Singleton, an artist and writer, is currently in the final stages of a PhD in design at Northumbria University, UK. His recent work deals with the construction of new institutions, and has been presented in the UK, US, Sweden, Italy and Korea. He also works commercially, and as an independent consultant has been involved in designing large-scale services for, amongst others, News International, Marie Stopes, and the UK’s National Health Service.
On Services: Culture Engines, Habit Traps and Fields of Flesh
Service design is more talked about than practiced, and the talk is a mixture of hands-on savvy with big-hearted polemics: methodological ‘toolkits’ and ruminations on ‘design thinking’ converge with - rather sketchy - promises of ‘community’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘wellbeing’. The four-year research programme I’ll be talking about takes a very different position on a field whose wide and rapid emergence is as surprising as the speed with which it has generated its own orthodoxy.
If a service is an act that benefits someone else, its design is an attempt to give human co-operation a particular shape: service design hacks the social in an effort to choreograph it. Services produce roles, habits, expectations, opportunities, etiquette, body postures, wealth, poverty, and political positions. Design's role in this production is not a priori ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, but complex, inevitable, powerfully charged, always questionable and never to be rushed into.
This research locates an alternative practice of service design at the intersection of historical attempts to push design ‘beyond the object‘ with recent forays into new political terrain stirred up across a range of disciplines. It attempts to unlock a role for service design as a medium of experimentation with new institutional forms. In the course of this talk, we will cross paths with the relationship between distributed organisations and all-out war, puzzle over whether a pregnant woman can be said to provide a service to her unborn child, outline tendencies of commercial design research we must strictly speaking call 'criminal' and 'surreal', think about how biotech challenges how we understand what ‘working for a living’ means and how we understand human habits... that is, in general, consider means of (re)starting conversation about what service design is, does, might be and could do.