Service design as the ground for alternative social and economic scenarios

This paper focuses on Service Design as the theoretical and operative framework for activities in very diversified contexts. Within this framework, the paper analyses the design of services and service systems as a form of mediation, integration and diffusion of new operational practices, that are gradually modifying the current socio-economic paradigm in the western countries. Service Design proposes new forms of value creation (Ramirez 1999) that cannot always be measured according to the current economic criteria. They are rather introducing new economic factors that contribute to the value creation process, such as experience (Pine and Gilmore 1999), time (Gorz 1999), knowledge (Rullani 2004), new roles in working and consuming (Rifkin 2000). The actions triggered by service design move the center of value production from material goods to immaterial actions and performances. The service perspective redefines the object of the production system, revising the very concept of material (Blomkvist, Clatworthy et al. 2016) with the consequences this implies on the nature of the material world. Services also propose new dynamics of relational mediation among stakeholders in social and economic systems. New categories of needs are introduced, while the old categories are reviewed. Furthermore a service dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch 2008) is revising the role of users in the production system giving them an active role and responsibility in the value creation process, considering them as co-workers, rather than passive receivers of service performances (Normann and Ramirez 1994). The new perspective is fundamental for rethinking the way private and public services systems can be re-designed (Bason 2010) and for investigating on the possibility that such social changes, often spontaneous and un-planned, could instead be the designed (Manzini 2015). Whether such changes are part of the existing socio-economic paradigm or alternative to it, the perspective proposed in this paper is also fundamental to understand the role of design and designers in the large process of transformation of modern economies.