The Service Design (SD) discipline is a shape-shifter concept, and therein lies its strength (Buchanan, 2001; Stickdown and Schneiner, 2019; Iqbal 2018). Whilst there seems to be a general understanding of what ‘Service Design’ means amongst practitioners and academics, there is no consensus for a single definition. Much like gender, it is largely dependent on the experience of the individual, however, like gender, some definitions are more accepted than others. Some common definitions are:

‘Service design is a system for visualising this phenomenon [the marketing of products and services], so that services can be given proper position and weight in the context of any market entity’ (Shoshtack, 1982, p.1). …

Within the context of this brief, we were asked to identify a ‘disrupted’ market — by the appearance of internet giants — and develop ‘an incumbent service’ to create non-zero-sum games, where all parties are ‘winners’ (instead of our current system, where inequality is a keen and painful reality). Our area of research was the music industry, and specifically the streaming platform Spotify. Nevertheless, within this brief, there are a series of assumptions that need to be unpacked. Firstly in regards to the meaning of disruption within business.

This project was a team effort. The amazing and talented members include Tania Carregha (Social Innovator), Leonardo Gentili (Service Designer), Ana María Ramírez Mourraille (Social Innovator). …

Firstly, the filtering algorithms in Spotify are 3 — natural language processing, collaborative filtering and audio analysis.

Two of them, natural language processing and audio analysis are mechanical. Natural language processing tracks news articles, blogs, and other texts around the internet, which we already know, is a filtered environment. It simply analyses your language or location, and so it assumes that because you live in a certain country you would like a specific kind of music. It makes assumptions based on your culture, and the culture that the internet creates. Raw audio model analysis looks at things like key, mode, tempo or loudness, since when Spotify creates playlists they all have to sound a similar way.

However, collaborative filtering is human-based. When a person inputs a new song into Spotify, there is a form where you have to label your music by genre and the ‘feeling it gives off’ via a description. This is where, for example, you need to input patterns of where you fit in with other singers. For example, if you’re a LGBTQ artist it’s suggested that put that in the description, which already leads to group mentality. Then, Spotify creates an implicit data feedback, it tracks whether a user saves an artist to their own playlist, or visits the artist page after listening to a song. Then, the algorithm suggests music for users that have liked similar songs to yours, or from users that have similar listening patterns to yours. …

Change is an organic state for companies, Judith Wainwright, director of management consultancy Bluestone with 30 years experience in management says ‘Just being an organisation is a constant process of change.’ (Wainwright, 2020, Zoom interview) This takes us to the next step of this concept analysis, companies are simply one more example of organisations. Which begs the question — what is an organisation?. ‘Organisation’ comes from the Latin organum “instrument”, indicating its usefulness. What’s more, it also means ‘organ’, understood both as a musical instrument and a part of the body (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2020, etymonline.com). It is fair to assume that this secondary meaning of ‘organisation’ relates to a piece part of a whole. The question being — what whole? The Cambridge dictionary definition of organisation is ‘a group of people whose members work together for a shared purpose in a continuing way’ ; an ‘arrangement according to a particular system’ (Cambridge Dictionary, 2020, cambridge.org). The reason for these different definitions is the difference between organization as an abstract entity and as a specific activity. The definitions are not clear cut, but they lie within a spectrum depending on how much abstraction or activity they hold. …

There are an array of business cases made in favour of inclusivity and diversity since the 1970s, particularly in the workplace. Renown business groups such as the Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, and Harvard Business Review amongst others, have released studies and articles showing with clear data how diversity promotes creativity in the workplace and has a real positive effect on ‘the bottom line’. Innovation revenue increases from 26% to 45% (Lorenzo et al, 2018, bcg.com) in diverse teams; workplaces with unfriendly work environments have a declining engagement of 30% (Thoroughgood et al, 2020, hbr.org). …

In this dissertation the world ‘self’ has been used, so far, rather lightly, in order to refer to the identification of individuals and societies. And whilst I do believe that there is a common understanding of the word, it is pertinent to create a theoretical framework in which to delve deeper into the self, identity and gender in the 21st century, specifically concentrating on European and Western history as the base for the ‘self’ in the United Kingdom today. Hence we enter into the second part of the research question.

Answering ‘what is the self’ has been the lifelong study of philosophers, psychologists, sociologists throughout history and I argue, it has always come with a gender bias. The following analysis comes from Will Buckingham’s ‘The Philosophy Book’, 2011. …

The following exercise is a thought provoking test to correlate personal values with sustainability systems.

In her book ‘Doughnut economics’ Kate Raworth speaks of the importance of visual references as a way to spark change — ‘words are processed by our short term memory where we can only retain about seven bits of information, images on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory’ (Raworth, 2017, p.13). Furthermore, speculative design uses the power of stories and ‘what if’questions to provoke our imagination.The power of future-proofing through this method of visual and non visual storytelling is well-founded and it inspires the core of this exercise:

Years have passed, the world was shaken by COVID19 and key figures across the world sat down to review the priorities of worldwide economies. Gigantic leaps in new sciences have been made and so the Resource Pill was created. The Pill is based on a simple rule — energy is never lost, only transformed. …

Case study for the Masters of Service Design, 2020

Nachhaltigkeit, ‘after-persistent-ness’

This report is a research based methodology of the project led by Ravensbourne University students during February to March 2020, clashing with the arrival of COVID-19 to the UK. In it we tackled the concept of sustainability, what this means for universities and the role that they can have as institutions in a volatile and uncertain moment in history.

Within the brief, we were first given the context of an industry in which sustainability is measured and ranked. The People & Planet organisation was aiming to create a system in which universities were made publicly accountable for their sustainability input and — by extension — creating a sense of competition. Ravensbourne ranked number 110 of the total 154 and appeared 10 out of 30 in the MASHEIN group. Nevertheless it was still dubbed a ‘third class university’ under the P&P ranking. The aim of the project brief was to increase sustainability collaborative approaches between universities. …