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EN / Service Design Research Group Co-Stars / Research Themes

Research Themes

Research themes
1) Care with Communities through Participatory Service Design and Arts-based Methods

This research theme is premised on the idea that participatory service design can facilitate empowerment, wellbeing and sustainable community development through arts-based methods. Participatory service design is steered with a moral commitment to engage with various communities at the margins to collaborate for a shared purpose. This purpose can be in co-creating and co-designing more inclusive, equal and sustainable societies and services. Participatory approach involves the stakeholders (e.g. employees, partners, customers, citizens, end-users) in the art and design processes to ensure that the results meet their needs and expectations. The approach also builds on dialogue, decolonisation and democratisation processes to identify new solutions for care, justice and inclusion and to advance social transformation.

The Co-stars group focuses mainly on the following themes:

- Social Design and Healthcare
- Care with Communities at the Margins
- Arctic Design
- Societal Challenges and the Arts
- Inclusion and Empowerment
- Transformations
2) Service Design for Smart Business Innovation and Cultural Economy

Collaboration with external organisations, such as public and private companies, is essential to develop knowledge and can lead to scalable international business operations. This research theme responds to the challenges posed to organisations by rapidly changing technologies and business environments. Service design in this field could create value and tools for institutions and companies to acquire new know-how that enables them to move smoothly between internal and external networks.

Service Design in organisations creates tools and methods to develop new value systems in service situations considering the customer needs, expectations and desires. Service Design process allows companies to experience and have a preview of specific behaviours at each touchpoint. Therefore, there are opportunities to bring together agile and readily usable technologies, art-based approaches which separately or together can improve existing services and enhance the acceptability of new service products.

The Co-stars group focuses mainly on the following themes:

- Artificial Intelligence
- Circular Economy
- Tourism

3) Socio-Materialising Service Design: Towards More-than-human Ethics

This research theme takes a socio-material perspective to study service processes and practices in organisations. Inspired by the recent ‘material turn’ and ‘non-human turn’ it sets out to challenge the common understanding of services as merely immaterial and human-centric processes. Recognising the myriad ways in which ‘social’ and ‘material’ entangle in service processes opens up a fruitful basis for furthering theorisations in service design, and for developing successful service practices and procedures.

Extending the scope of agency to include also material things and non-humans (such as animals, insects and plants) plays a significant role in how service processes and practices, as well as the ethics and care, are enacted. This premise enables the development of socially and materially sustainable and ethical conceptualisations for services and practical service solutions.

The Co-stars group focuses mainly on the following themes:

- Ethical Agencies in Organisational Service Processes
- Designing Services for Promixity Tourism

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