Forming a Cumulus Working group for Service Design, November 3
This is an open invite to a meet-up to form a Cumulus working group for education, teaching and learning in the area of service design.
Date: 3rd november 2018
Location: Wuxi, Cumulus conference
As more designers work in areas where a service perspective is dominant, new demands on knowledge, skills and attitudes are being forefronted. As relational perspectives become more important to design, culture and design can strengthen each other across old borders. As more designers call themselves service designers, new constellations of and relations between design practices develop. As more non-trained designers are doing and being involved in design work, new possibilities and challenges ensue to act as a trained designer. As universities and design schools increase their engagement in service organisations, social or societal challenges, new ways of working develop that relates to taking responsibility in such relationships. These challenges are not uniform for all universities, design schools, programs or courses. Across countries and cultures there is a large variation and a pluralism that is a good growing ground for sharing and developing knowledge.
While this invitation uses terms like ‘service design’, which may assume a prefigured field, this working group is also open to other understandings of what ‘service’ and ‘design’ might mean when framed from another culture or practice. Exercising diversity is one aim of this meet-up so we may respectfully connect and share in our encounters.
The basic idea of the working group is to connect universities and design schools around the new challenges for design and design education when engaging in service industry, public sector, civil society and societal transformation. The fundament for the working group is open sharing of challenges, ways of working, development goals, ideas for solutions, curricula, etc. The goal is to support each other in developing into being better in responding and handling the challenges, so that our students become better designers and our collaborators regardless of sector are better environments for designing.
We foresee that we will hold Share/Critique sessions in Cumulus conferences, organize DoTanks inbetween conferences, and publish our joint work through e.g. the Cumulus ThinkTank series. We also foresee collaborations with different Cumulus partners.
In Wuxi we want to meet up with interested parties, that later will be part of forming the formal Working Group in time for the Cumulus conference in Rovaniemi in 2019.
Full program for the conference: Cumulus Wuxi program
Register for the conference: Regster for the Cumulus Wuxi conference
The initiators behind the call is the network of universities behind the ServDes conference; Politecnico di Milano, Linköping University, University of Lapland, AHO, Aalborg University, Sungkyunkwan University, RMIT, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Laurea UAS.
For the Wuxi meetup the organisers are
Yong Se Kim, Sungkyunkwan University
Satu Miettinen, University of Lapland
Stefan Holmlid, Linköping University
Piia Rytilahti, University of Lapland
