Conference Themes
The Service Design and Innovation conference is the premier research conference for exchanging knowledge within Service Design and Service Innovation studies. Even if the conference is research-focused, the format and the selection of publications are relevant for academics, practitioners, and industry. ServDes is organized around themes that are defined by the conference committee and organizers. The papers are peer-reviewed in a double-blind review process and published in the conference proceedings. The theme for the 2023 edition is presented below.
Entanglements and flows:
service encounters and meanings
Alternative worldviews and valorization of local knowledge and practices increasingly question how service innovators and researchers consider the intersections among nature, culture, and society. Aspects such as otherness, justice, spirituality, vulnerability, or improvisation, among others, are redefining service encounters and ecosystems. Discussions of human-nonhuman relations are challenging user-centered design approaches.
These processes explicitly or implicitly question service research and practices regarding the focus of its activities: services.
What (how, who or when) is a service?
It has been a learning process that includes academic and non-academic knowledge and highlights contrasts between alternative and mainstream practices, which may increasingly lead to new theoretical developments and political consequences.
Service designers and innovators may use their skills to hear multiple voices and ideas, get entangled in their localities, and navigate unexpected flows to evidence new service meanings.
ServDes.2023 aims to explore new perspectives on these continually reframed questions and their consequences on service design theory and practices.
Rio de Janeiro is the location of ServDes.2023. The city is economically driven by the service sector, composed of formally designed service provisions and a meshwork of informal, imprecise, improvised, unacknowledged services. Different social groups and workers collide or dialogue in various public or private spaces. This location offers immersive experiences on multiple aspects of the service phenomena, supporting the conference’s central theme.
Suggested Themes
We welcome submissions that explore the following themes, but are not restricted to:
Social innovation, localities and transformative processes
Social innovation processes may reveal the emergence of new service ideas, or services may be designed to support local transformative processes. These changing processes may be referred to and impact neighborhoods or cities. This situated dimension may include new service encounters and new local ecosystems, which may be supported or hindered by digital technologies and platforms.
Services, business and social economy
Services may express the emergence of local autonomy and the resilience of communities and ecosystems. They may integrate the framework of a creative social economy, including services related to informality and understood under the “effectuation” theory of entrepreneurship. Services may operate based on complementary currencies and be part of a circular or a distributed economy model.
Reimagining work: service or servitude
Services express the potential of designers and innovators as political agents. That is, as actors capable to influence the power balance in service provisions and service encounters. Enabling ecosystems, and in particular digital platforms, maybe express new forms of servitude. There would be a call for worker-centred design activities, or for reimagining work relations and processes in services.
Services and relationships: humans, beyond and below
Many services are focused on human relationships. Usually, strangers meet for the first time and collaborate to co-produce a service, but many evolve or rely on continuous and intensive collaborations and relationships. There may be ways for designers and innovators to navigate or get entangled in these human encounters. Services however may be increasingly reframed by more-than-human, posthuman and less-than-human (dehumanizing) perspectives.
Services, technologies, and futures
Technological development continuously opens possibilities for service design, and in this process, agency, capabilities, and power are distributed across humans, machines and the natural systems in different ways. Technodiversity also emerges as a vision where technological development could be related to systems of knowledge manifested in different localities: ways of life, and ways of sensing and ordering experiences. This may bring new challenges in designing social-technical systems as services.
Services between and beyond worlds
The possibilities of decolonial approaches to services expressed also with the term “autonomous design”, include challenging commercial and modernizing aims to propose placed-based approaches and to embrace multiple worlds. This pluriversal perspective may challenge usual service definitions and ideas. Not to forget the influence of feminist perspectives that are opening up new approaches to services. New design communities and networks may collaborate in the constitution of a “designerly” way of conceiving services.
Services for Emergency: disasters, war, refugees, pandemic
Designers and innovators around the world, in alliance with other disciplines, had to navigate a global pandemic. New and old challenges are continually renewed, which requires quick local responses and strategic problem-solving capabilities. Challenges are related to war, refugees, and natural disasters, among others. Designers and innovators have developed and explored new possibilities for their practices on services under such pressing demands and constraints.
Other Themes
Likewise, submissions on other themes related to the conference’s main topic are welcomed.
Download here the Call for Submissions
Submission guidelines
Long Papers
We invite submission of advanced and high-quality papers of up to 6000 words (including abstract, tables, references, and figure captions) that address the Conference theme and make a substantive contribution as critiques, theorization, or knowledge production in the Service Design field, with implications for research and practice. Selection of long papers submissions will be based on the most substantial potential for acceptance in indexed journals, in particular, the best papers will be invited to compose a special issue of the Strategic Design Research Journal – SDRJ.
Long papers should be written and presented in English only.
Short Papers
We invite exploratory, speculative, and/or provocative works of up to 3000 words (including abstract, tables, references, and figure captions) that address the conference theme, including those in progress. The short paper track aims to provide opportunities for lively and respectful discussion.
Short papers should be written and presented in English only.
Workshops
Workshops submitted should address one of all the conference themes. We invite submission in two categories:
1) Thematic workshops (1.5hrs): Proposals that explore concepts, theories, processes, frameworks, practices, and pragmatics through a smaller workshop format. Venues will be provided but please include specific requirements, such as materials, facilities, and technologies in your proposal;
2) Embedded workshops (1.5hrs): Proposals embedded within a workplace, in the field, or at the site of specific Service Design-oriented projects in Rio de Janeiro. These workshops give participants an insight into local practices and working environments. Please note that convenors from outside Rio de Janeiro can submit a proposal if they partner with a local practitioner.
Workshop proposal could be written and conducted in Portuguese, English, or Spanish.
Student Forum
We invite Undergraduate, Master, and Ph.D. students and recent graduates to a dedicated day of discussions, workshops and networking held during the conference. This forum aims to provide a platform to discuss current works, exchange ideas, gain feedback from colleagues, network with experts and emerging practitioners in Service Design, share examples of complete or underway assignments and celebrate project’s excellence. Please submit a 300-word abstract, including how one or more of the conference subthemes are being addressed.
Student Forum abstract could be written and presented in Portuguese, English, or Spanish.
Important Dates
| 6th June 2022 | Call for submissions |
| 18th July 2022 | System open for submissions |
| 24th October 2022 | Long / Short Papers submissions deadline |
| 28th November 2022 | Workshops / Student Forum Abstracts submissions deadline |
| Late January 2023 | Opening of the registration system |
| 7th February 2023 | Notification to authors (accepted or rejected) and feedback |
| 28th April 2023 | Camera ready papers deadline for accepted submissions |
| 11th to 14th July 2023 | Conference dates |
Review process
All submissions will be blind peer-reviewed by an international review panel, according to evaluation criteria set by the scientific committee. Once reviewed, all authors will be notified of acceptance, conditional acceptance, or rejection. Submissions that are accepted conditionally will be required to address the feedback by the camera-ready resubmission date. Long Papers that are unfortunately rejected will have the opportunity to re-write and submit as Short Paper.
All submissions must be anonymous and must not contain the name(s) of author(s) or any references of institutions for the purposes of blind peer review. Please ensure these are removed (including file names, captions, etc) prior to upload in the submission system.
Acceptance of notification will be sent by e-mail. Those accepted will be required to attend and present, discuss questions, and engage with the conference program. This means at least one author must register for the conference for the submission to be included in the proceedings. All accepted and revised submissions must be formatted in the ServDes.2023 template and submitted to the conference system.