Conference Workshops
Social innovation, localities and transformative processes
Exploring formats of prototyping complex, systemic, interconnected scenarios
This workshop explores how prototyping can contribute to participatory urban transformation processes in which systems are the matter of design. In the intractable, interconnected, unbounded, dynamic, and highly complex scenarios of cities and neighbourhoods, the rules of the game have changed. The prototyping practices and procedures related to their traditional application may not be sufficient for the new systemic configurations. The practice of prototyping can be useful to support this systemic change only if a substantial change in this practice is considered, that addresses the new scenarios of design that have become unbounded, layered, fluctuating and interconnected. Considering the growing necessity of reformulating the practice of prototyping in urban transitions, the workshop will be an opportunity for participants to put to the test this traditional and effective methodology of design with some adaptation for those demanding scenarios. more info
Convenors: Maria Vitaller del Olmo, Nicola Morelli and Amalia de Götzen
Wednesday July 12th, afternoon – 16:30 to 18:00 (ART 1 Room)
Finding the balance between technology and culture: A service design dilemma
Services exist at the core of local communities and culture. The people and their practices in the local communities have always nurtured services. Decades back, when there was no mention of service design, the local ecosystems were thriving with human-centric and sustainable services. The dynamic nature of the culture kept changing the local ecosystem, where some services survived while others vanished. The workshop aims to explore the multicultural perspectives on hyperlocal services, focusing on the tension between humane values and technology advancements. It allows participants to push and pull the strings of human touchpoints and digital/tech touchpoints with informed cultural relevance. more info
Convenors: Saksham Panda and Shagun Bajpai
Thursday July 13th, afternoon – 17:00 to 18:30 (Tendas – ART 5 Room)
Transitions in public design practice: learning from waste management systems
In this workshop we aim to welcome the service design community to discuss key transitions taking place in public sector design practice – from non-conscious design to systems-level transformation– with the goal to develop the first iteration of a manifesto that can serve to guide those transitions. The case of urban waste systems will be used as a practical and material context for the workshop. more info
Convenors: Caio Werneck, Javier Guillot, Katie Saviano and Maraya Keny-Guyer
Thursday July 13th, afternoon – 17:00 to 18:30 (Tendas – ART 4 Room)
When species meet in the city: service design for endangered wildlife
Cities are usually considered home for people and communities, but not for wildlife. In thinking about and developing cities, why don’t we think about the non-human inhabitants, including public spaces and services? The purpose of this workshop is to encourage participants to consider how wildlife shares cities with humans. In Instituto Vida Livre, a non-governmental organization (NGO) from Rio de Janeiro, endangered wild animals are rescued, rehabilitated, and released back into the wild. This is an example of a service for non-humans. more info
Convenors: Matheus Pereira Ferreira Ventura, Ingrid Wagner Bico and Roched Seba
Wednesday July 12th, afternoon – 16:30 to 18:00 (DAD Building)
Services, business and social economy
Design at the interplay of new technologies and financial services in the Global South
The aim of this thematic workshop we aim to bring to the discussion the challenges of designing technologies for financial services in Brazil and the Global South, inviting the audience to participate in practical exercises and discuss two case studies: a conversational system that aims to support access to microcredit for small business owners, called Business Heath Index voice-based Bot (BHI Bot) and CariCrop, an application that addresses payment delays, attempting to bridge the gap between purchase of goods and de-facto payments through Digital Ledger Technologies (DLTs) such as Blockchains. In the workshop the two applications will be presented as probes to discuss essential ethical values to design technologies for social good. more info
Convenors: Heloisa Candello, Larissa Pschetz and Kruakae Pothong
Wednesday July 12th, afternoon – 16:30 to 18:00 (ART 3 Room)
Co-Imagining Circular Futures In The Food Industry [out of PUC-Rio Campus]
In this workshop, ServDes attendees will experience an in-place co-creation activity with a local food business in Rio de Janeiro – Delírio Tropical Restaurant, our partner for this workshop. By connecting different food system realities and perspectives – ours being the Canadian context, and Delírio Tropical’s, being the Brazilian context – we can share our learnings and together co-imagine possible circular futures. more info
Convenors: Bianca Del Rio Kodato, Marcia Higuchi and Hunter Milroy
Thursday July 13th, afternoon – 17:00 to 18:30 (Delírio Tropical Gávea restaurant)
Service design education and new paradigm shift in a changing world
In this is a thematic workshop there will be discussed about the role or position of service design in the world that is in crises and in constant change. We see that there is a need to review the current paradigms how design is being educated today. While design research is clearly looking for a paradigm change, design education has often kept a conservative position. The workshop participants will discuss the possibility of introducing new parameters to evaluate the quality of service design and new teaching strategies to support transition. more info
Convenors: Nicola Morelli, Satu Miettinen and Mari Suoheimo
Friday July 14th, afternoon – 13:45 to 15:15 (ART 1 Room)
Service design and professional practice: deliverables and implementation
The types of representation that communicate results of service design projects are still not consensual and the literature points out that there are gaps between the deliverables of a service design project and its following implementation. Resources as journeys, blueprints, storyboards, physical/digital prototypes in low and medium fidelity and staging are commonly used to communicate project results, but how can these results be made actionable to facilitate implementation by organizations of the most diverse types? How could technology be used to improve the effectiveness of project outputs? The purpose of this thematic workshop is to bring together researchers and professionals in the field to a) discuss the main ways of communicating the results of service design projects (deliverables); b) discuss how these representations can contribute to the implementation of projects; c) create a post-ServDes discussion agenda for the topic. more info
Convenors: Camilla Fernanda Annarumma Durão, Cristiane Aun Bertoldi, Maria Alice Gonzales and Rafael Toledo Rodrigues de Fátima
Friday July 14th, afternoon – 13:45 to 15:15 (ART 3 Room)
Reimagining work: service or servitude
Work.Futures – an ethical assessment for service workplaces
Work and its context, the workplace, are new objects under the realm of service design. In fact, new interactions between knowledge or gig workers and service organizations are adding complexity to traditional relationships between employers, employees, operators, and users in the context of decentralized and remote work management, to maintain service ecosystems and digital platform models. While organizations are often focused on operational efficiency, we propose a thematic workshop on “Reimagining work: service or servitude” to articulate ethical worker-centric factors for workplaces. The workshop focuses on testing a method to ethically assess service organizations’ workplace experiences around factors of cognitive well-being, social and economic inclusiveness, diversity, and sustainability, to prevent new forms of knowledge, financial, or operational servitude. more info
Convenors: Antonio Cesare Iadarola and Antonio Starnino
Thursday July 13th, afternoon – 17:00 to 18:30 (ART 3 Room)
Meaningful Work Canvas Workshop
Service design has achieved excellence in providing meaningful experiences for users. Nonetheless, service design did not reach the same success in providing good conditions for workers. To discuss this gap, the present thematic workshop will present the Meaningful Work Canvas. The research efforts on meaningful work, due to the multidimensionality of the concept, can shed light on some aspects of the work activity, which are particularly useful for service designers. The workshop will have four stages: tool presentation, interviews, service improvement, and conclusion. Convenors expect that the workshop will be an opportunity for participants to reflect on how work can be meaningful for themselves and on ways to design a worker-centered service. more info
Convenors: Gustavo Barreto and Carla Cipolla
Friday July 14th, afternoon – 13:45 to 15:15 (Tendas – ART 4 Room)
Services, technologies, and futures
Theater of the Techno-Oppressed
Theater of the Techno-Oppressed workshop aims to raise critical consciousness on digital services’ role in structuring oppression relations in everyday life, mainly how it constrains our bodies to physical and political posturing that accepts oppression as an inevitable deed. Dating apps, ride-hailing apps, digital labor platforms, video streaming, and social networks depend on users lingering at specific postures several times a day to meet their not-so-clear ends. The workshop participants experiment with theater techniques to identify, analyze, discuss, and speculate reactions to technology-mediated oppression. At the end of the workshop, the participants discuss and compare that experience with other embodied interaction design methods — such as bodystorming — and speculate on further applications in Service Design. more info
Convenors: Frederick van Amstel and Bibiana Oliveira Serpa
Wednesday July 12th, afternoon – 16:30 to 18:00 (Tendas – ART 5 Room)
Threads of Assumption: AI-service design and Weaving
The recent explosion of open-source artificial intelligence (AI) platforms expands possibilities for service design. However, the AI-reliant systems in the products and technologies we design replicate harmful constructions of race and gender inherent in the datasets used for training. In response, Threads of Assumption, a multi-year interactive art project, collects stories of gender bias to investigate how AI processes them. This workshop focuses on story collection. Using our expertise as designers, we cultivate a meditative space where hands-on activities—writing and weaving—personalize sensitive topics and make complexity tangible and accessible. Participants leave with best practices for workshop facilitation, tools for integrating physical making into workshop design, and an expanded understanding of how gender bias affects them and their communities. more info
Convenors: Sofie Hodara and Martha Rettig
Thursday July 13th, afternoon – 17:00 to 18:30 (ART 2 Room)
Service design in the digital age: using storytelling and data visualization to co-analyze complex problems [conducted in Portuguese]
This workshop brings an innovative approach to co-analyze mixed data through data visualization tools, testing underexplored technologies. The goal is to create a collaborative activity that helps understand complex problems using quantitative data from the city and qualitative data from citizens. The exercise proposes an immersion into the effects of weather conditions on urban mobility. With climate change, extreme events will become more frequent, impacting urban mobility services. At the same time, with technological advancements, a vast amount of data is being generated, representing a potential repository of knowledge. Participants can discuss the presented data and learn an alternative way of designing services. more info
Convenors: Raquel Cordeiro and Isabela Motta
Friday July 14th, afternoon – 13:45 to 15:15 (ART 2 Room)
Services between and beyond worlds
Talking through things: Enhancing intercultural collaboration through evocative objects
Service design teams are composed of people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. To be successful navigating this pluriverse, collaborative teams need to develop mechanisms to embrace and nurture the power of diversity. However, teams often lack specific tools and skills to leverage the strengths of diversity. This workshop session aims to provide participants – and service designers in particular –tools to raise awareness of cultural differences and similarities, and experience first-hand the impact of materiality – in the form of evocative objects – as enhancers of intercultural conversations. We explore how surfacing a variety of mental models through objects is possible and effective in intercultural teams. Our goal is to demonstrate how design teams can use this approach to approach a new problem space from different perspectives, benefiting from the power of diversity. more info
Convenors: Estefania Ciliotta Chehade and Michael Arnold Mages
Wednesday July 12th, afternoon – 16:30 to 18:00 (ART 2 Room)
Uncovering the other factors of our service experiences
Services are part of a great part of people’s lives, therefore, services must consider their possible impact on people’s perception of well-being. The aim of this workshop is the same as its name because many aspects of our experience are still unknown. The other factors are referred mainly to nature, and how they are present in our lives and linked with the manner we experience services but with completely anonymous participation. The workshop seeks to experientially discover the influence of other living beings in our interactions with a service. If humans see themselves as a part of a community or ecosystem of living beings the perception of our environment and our recycling decisions could change. more info
Convenors: Mariluz Soto and Ella Björn
Wednesday July 12th, afternoon – 16:30 to 18:00 (Tendas – ART 4 Room)
Services for Emergency: disasters, war, refugees, pandemic
Design Against War
The thematic workshop aims at expanding the design reflection initiated in March 2022 with Design Against War – DAW (https://www.design.polimi.it/en/design-against-war) is an international platform of initiatives and projects initially launched by the School of Design of the Politecnico di Milano, open to contributions from students and teachers of all design or related schools and universities. The workshop will move from the categorization of the ideas and projects showcased in the online platform to elicit service design essentials (activity models, interaction principles, relational mechanisms, ethical principles, behavioral journeys, aesthetic qualities, user experiences, touchpoint elements, and more) that could become the words of a new design vocabulary to create services of a non-aggressive value and with a transformative power for communities. more info
Convenors: Anna Meroni, Ezio Manzini and Teresa Franqueira
Friday July 14th, afternoon – 13:45 to 15:15 (Tendas – ART 5 Room)
Other Themes
Service Design Identities
The Service Design Identities project is an international research initiative co-produced by the workshop convenors that is aiming to delineate the diverse and possible directions Service Design education could take to better address ongoing societal transformations and emerging Service Design professional identities, value and roles of alumni graduated from existing Master programs in Service Design in the world. Given the maturity of the field and the transformational debates and challenges that are crossing design studies, we wish to offer a timely platform to reflect on how service design education is developing, how service design professionals are currently working and to collaboratively propose future directions and opportunities. more info
Convenors: Carla Cipolla, Teresa Franqueira, Stefan Holmlid, Shera Hyunyim PARK, Jung-Joo Lee, Lara Penin, Daniela Sangiorgi, Eduardo Staszowski, Beatrice Villari and Eun Yu
Thursday July 13th, afternoon – 17:00 to 18:30 (ART 1 Room)