The Bloomsbury Handbook of Service Design

Plural perspectives and a critical contemporary agenda

Lara Penin, Alison Prendiville, Daniela Sangiorgi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781350330290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

Drawing on a diverse array of service and design related thinkers and practitioners, this volume is a timely and critical review of the themes and intersecting disciplines that are questioning and opening up the field towards plural perspectives, showing its complexity, exposing its challenges and offering practical examples and directions.

With the growing popularity of service design both in industry and academia, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Service Design examines the discipline's core principles to develop our understanding of the context, role and impact of this practice. The editors bring together multiple voices from around the world to share experiences and perspectives on how service design interacts with global topics such as climate, social justice and racial issues, and looks at directions for the future.

Organised into five distinct sections, chapters explore a variety of key topics within the world of service design, including Plural Service & Design Cosmologies, A Critical Agenda for Service Design, Contextualising Services, Systems and Change, Developing Service Design Practices and Approaches, and Building Futures

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• SECTION 2 Plural Services and Design Cosmologies
• 2.1 Service Design at the Crossroads of Multiple Knowledge Forms and Epistemologies
• 2.2 Unfolding Services as Collective Conversations: Rhetoric, Dialectic and Deliberative
• 2.3 Cultivating Reflexivity in Service Design: Considerations, Examples, Critical Reflections and Questions
• 2.4 In the Pursuit of Decolonizing Dominant Service Design: Three Reflexive Stories
• 2.5 Current, Potential and Future Trajectories for Interdisciplinarity across Service and Design Research
• SECTION 3 A Critical Agenda for Service Design
• 3.1 Justice in Designing Services
• 3.2 Worker-Centred Service Design: Countering the Invisibility of Workers
• 3.3 The Politics of Participation in Service Design: Preparation, Emergence and Refusals
• 3.4 The Case for Feminist Service Design
• 3.5 Embracing the Unknown: Service Design Approaches to Address Uncertainty
• SECTION 4 Contextualizing Services, Systems and Change
• 4.1 Making Sense of Design for Business: Towards an Umbrella Paradigm Moving Service Design and Its Allied Fields Forward
• 4.2 A Systemic Perspective on Service Design
• 4.3 Research Dialogues for Proximity and Trust When Working with Government
• 4.4 Service Design and Social Change
• 4.5 The Music that Breaks the Gramophone: Opening Service Design Education to Perspectives beyond the Present Paradigm
• SECTION 5 Developing Service Design Practices and Approaches
• 5.1 Collective Embodiment in Service Interfaces
• 5.2 Design Facilitation: Navigating Complex and Asymmetrical Contexts
• 5.3 Queering Service Design: Toward a Truly Human-Centred Design Orientation
• 5.4 Dialogical Empathy in Services: Guidelines and Principles between Art and Design
• 5.5 Service Design Ethnography: Experiences from Practice-Based Research
• 5.6 Journeys of Digital Transformation: A Reflection on Stories of Organizational Change and the Role of Service Designers
• 5.7 Service Design Narratives
• SECTION 6 Building Futures
• 6.1 Speculative Services: Critical Technology Literacy and the Future of Service Design
• 6.2 More-than-Human Service Design
• 6.3 A Political Dialogue about Government Service Design Politics
• 6.4 Designing Services for Dehumanizing Futures
• 6.5 Commoning for a Regenerative World: Realizing New Directions for Service Design
• 7 Conclusions
• Index