ServDes2018 - Service Design Proof of Concept Politecnico di Milano 18th-19th-20th, June 2018 Dance of designing: Rethinking position, relation and movement in service design Shana Agid agids@newschool.edu Parsons School of Design, 66 5 th Avenue, 6 th Floor, New York 10011, New York, USA Yoko Akama yoko.akama@rmit.edu.au RMIT University, Australia Abstract Despite the recognised need for service design (SD) to understand the complexity in which it intervenes, we are concerned with its desire to fix dynamic configurations through a dominant instrumentalized worldview. We critique the journey map – an iconic method in SD – as one illustration of this fixing tendency in order to highlight how nuanced details are sometimes designed out and argue why such omission is ethical and political. In contrast, following feminist theory, we ground our accounts of practice to argue that service ecologies are situated and continually emergent, constituted by the changing configuration of various things. Instead of fixing to make static or finalise, we use freezing as a temporary state to trace and orientate our movements in a co-design workshop. The similarity of and tension between notions of fixing and freezing is used to call out nuanced differences and attend to the intrinsic, dynamic and temporal nature of service design. KEYWORDS: positionality, politics, emergence, feminist theory, participatory design Introduction: Accounting for relationality in service design Service design operates in the realm of emergent and dynamic relationships – among people, between people and things, and between those differently situated. Relationships in service design are also created by imaginations of what things, spaces, places, and people could or should do in the future, and how access to those futures are framed. Closer examinations of the relational also include accounting for perspectives of people doing describing and intervening through design. In other words, how a practitioner orientates to service design decides what matters, shapes their experiences, suggests what is deemed ‘knowledge’, and more. If such phenomena and dimensions are significant in noticing what emerges through interventions, and what (designers) can imagine, we question why they are recognised or ignored and attribute these to two broad tendencies, centrally related to worldviews.