We have two special 30-minute guest seminars from Jenny Darzentas and John Darzentas, both related to Service Design.
Dr Jenny Darzentas — Service Design and Inclusive Innovation: material and experiential dimensions.
The concentration on services is well understood in economic terms. The use of service designers to support innovation in businesses and regenerate public services is a recent development, but one that has seen success. At a more global level, the call for inclusive innovation is a theoretical stance that recognises that inequality is not sustainable, potentially de-stabilising and frankly immoral. At the same time, we are witnessing moves from the material to the experiential, in line with both technological developments and the need for planetary stewardship.
This talk will discuss the interplay between service design and inclusive innovation, their connection with social innovation and other emerging models such as those from industry 4.0 and IoT, and the use of systems thinking in making sense of these. Using ideas from systems science, it will try to show how systems thinking applied to service design can be brought to bear on these, sometimes contradictory, paradigms. These also means understanding the importance of the interconnectedness and mapping out, as much as possible, relationships between system parts; of accounting for the dynamic nature of systems, rather than assuming they are static; and of paying due care to perturbations and long-term consequences of actions. Marshalling all these together may give us powerful means for harnessing and giving direction to the ways forward that are both desirable and sustainable, co-creating value for individuals and society.
Dr Jenny Darzentas (BA, London, UK, PhD City University, UK) is an Assistant Professor (elect) in the Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering of the University of the Aegean and lectures on Service Design, Design for All (Inclusive Design); Information Design; and Interaction Design; and for the academic years 2016-18 she is a Marie Curie Experienced Research Fellow, working with Professor Helen Petrie and the HCI Research Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York specifically investigating older people, and their use of various types of technologies, both assistive and mainstream. Her publications cover subjects in Design and HCI, such as user needs for information; accessibility practices and policies; and educational requirements in these subjects. She has worked on many national and European funded projects, and has publications stemming from these on library and archival programmes; online learning; on issues of accessibility; on the interaction of personal profiles/device profiles aiming at seamless interactions; teaching of Design for All and most recently a MOOC on Digital Accessibility. She also has an interest in standardisation, has previously worked on the standardisation of learning objects, and is currently chairperson of the Working Group on Accessibility of European umbrella group ANEC[1] (“the consumer voice in standardisation”), and sits on the ISO Technical Committee 173 (ISO/TC173 Assistive Products for persons with disability) and is a nominated expert working on Mandate 473, a standardisation initiative to help to underpin the upcoming European Accessibility Act. Her current research interests are in Design for All, specifically she is working with older people and technology, the self-service paradigm and accessibility, and on Systems Thinking and Service Design.
John Darzentas — Design in a Complex World: The use of Systems Thinking in Design and the catalytic role of Service Design
In Design we are increasingly dealing with human-centric problems that are, in their majority, complex and messy. Such problems are difficult to understand and deal with. The robustness of the suggested ways of tackling these problems depends upon capturing as much of the relevant design space as possible. Systems Thinking is, among other approaches, one that claims to aid the efforts to capture and understand the design problem space and describe in an operational way how to intervene. A well-grounded overview of a complex problem situation attempts to capture a whole picture through Systemic Design in the form of a ‘Holon’. Making use of that rich picture is important to avoid reductionism. The approach to Systemic Design presented here is moving from the Holon to a Systemic Framing by ‘translating’ it into ‘Systems Language’ and then use notions, tenets and principles from Systems Thinking to guide the design interventions. Capturing the ‘Holon’ and expressing it in Systems Thinking terms will allow designers to leverage the power of systemic thought to design interventions that:
- Are Sustainable and will endure
- Will ‘Solve the right problem’ and address underlying problems not easily discernible in a complex messy situation
- Help promote understanding on an interdisciplinary scale, in order to create the grounding for design interventions.
Definitions, properties, and possible applications of Systems Thinking will be briefly presented applied to examples of Service Design that embodies a new area of Design Research. Service Design is naturally complex and a prime paradigm that gains from adopting Systems Thinking for Design problem space capturing, understanding and moving towards praxis. An important outcome of our research has been to reorient the focus of the Design intervention in that products, tangible or intangible, are considered as the byproducts of Service Design.
Professor John Darzentas (BSc Athens, MSc Sussex, UK, PhD London, UK) is former Head and founder of Department of Product and Systems Design Engineering of the University of the Aegean, holding the chair of Operational Research. For the period Jan 2017-June 2017, and Jan 2018-June 2018, he has been awarded a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship to work with the HCI Research Group, in the Dept of Computer Science at University of York, UK. He has held academic faculty positions in universities in the UK (Universities of London, Reading and South Bank) Finland (Abo Akademi, Turku), and in Greece (visiting Professor in the Department of Economics, University of Athens; and Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business). Within the University of the Aegean, he has held a number of positions in three departments: Professor in the Department of Mathematics, and Professor and Head of the Department of Information and Communication Systems, and currently, Dept of Product and Systems Design Engineering, University of the Aegean. During the setting-up of the Cyprus University of Technology, he was on the advisory board of the Department of Graphics and Multimedia. His research interests are wide-ranging and include Systems Thinking and Systemic Design; Service Design; Information Systems Design; Intelligent Systems and Decision Support Systems; Human Computer Interaction; issues of Multi-Inter-Trans-Disciplinarity. He has worked in many real-life applications, from road traffic to ferry traffic, and from medicine and primary health centres to education and networking infrastructures. He is on the editorial board of a number of journals and has authored many papers, published in books, journals and conference proceedings. He has served as Scientific Lead in a large number of funded research programmes, both national and European. His current teaching activities include Theory and Methodologies for Design, Service Design and Systems Thinking.