ServDes.2023

It has been over a decade since Service Design landed in Brazil as a discipline aiming at changing the service landscape in the country. How was this journey until now and what can we expect in the future? What are the fundamental characteristics of the country and its services and what can we learn about it? This presentation will take ServDes.2023 participants into a discovery journey into Brazilian culture, its services strengths, weaknesses and curiosities and the opportunities and challenges for the Service Design practice.

Service Design as a field of research and practice has evolved over the years expanding its scope and action. This has inevitably led us to approaching fields and theories related to complex systems and ecosystems transformation. We have been adopting these perspectives to increasingly operate as designers and researchers within larger scale transformation projects and initiatives expanding our methodological lenses. This journey of design expansion has though clashed against the pressing need to start flipping our lenses toward the inner selves as the specular side of this giant design work. This presentation will be a personal account and reflection on the challenges of designing starting from the self and moving all the way up to system change.

FICA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing affordable housing for low-income families in downtown São Paulo, Brazil, by developing alternative models to property that counter predatory tenement housing practices, real estate speculation, and gentrification. FICA works with single-family apartments, multi-family shared houses, and more recently, housing for families facing homelessness using the Housing First approach. Through its different programs, FICA tests new service models that combine tools to promote collaborative management of properties and assist tenants in achieving more stability and improving other aspects of their lives. This presentation will present FICA’s work since its foundation in 2015, highlighting the work done in the last year in collaboration with Parsons DESIS Lab through a Henry Luce Foundation grant to explore and expand the service aspects of its housing alternative models.

FICA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing affordable housing for low-income families in downtown São Paulo, Brazil, by developing alternative models to property that counter predatory tenement housing practices, real estate speculation, and gentrification. FICA works with single-family apartments, multi-family shared houses, and more recently, housing for families facing homelessness using the Housing First approach. Through its different programs, FICA tests new service models that combine tools to promote collaborative management of properties and assist tenants in achieving more stability and improving other aspects of their lives. This presentation will present FICA’s work since its foundation in 2015, highlighting the work done in the last year in collaboration with Parsons DESIS Lab through a Henry Luce Foundation grant to explore and expand the service aspects of its housing alternative models.

FICA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing affordable housing for low-income families in downtown São Paulo, Brazil, by developing alternative models to property that counter predatory tenement housing practices, real estate speculation, and gentrification. FICA works with single-family apartments, multi-family shared houses, and more recently, housing for families facing homelessness using the Housing First approach. Through its different programs, FICA tests new service models that combine tools to promote collaborative management of properties and assist tenants in achieving more stability and improving other aspects of their lives. This presentation will present FICA’s work since its foundation in 2015, highlighting the work done in the last year in collaboration with Parsons DESIS Lab through a Henry Luce Foundation grant to explore and expand the service aspects of its housing alternative models.

Service design is an emerging field in Afrikan economies, gaining traction in higher education institutions. As businesses continue to grow in developing economies like Afrika, the need for service design concepts becomes crucial for advancing local systems towards sustainable futures. This presentation examines the evolving landscape of service design in the Afrikan context and showcase examples that demonstrate the use of technology to enhance services in Afrikan economies. By exploring the intersection of service design, technology, and futures, we gain insights into their transformative potential for shaping the future of Afrikan economies.

The exclusive focus on efficiency and effectiveness has led to services which, by transforming human interactions into formalized procedures, distance people from one another and hinder, even making impossible, collaboration and care. Faced with the problems brought by this drift towards a society that is increasingly incapable of caring, it is necessary to use what is indicated by social innovation and develop a new generation of collaborative services. That is, services which, while maintaining their performative dimension, also cultivate a relational one by generating new networks of care: care between people and care of the ecosystem to which they belong.