Service encounters and meanings
Alternative worldviews and valorization of local knowledge and practices increasingly question how service innovators and researchers consider the intersections among nature, culture, and society. Aspects such as otherness, justice, spirituality, vulnerability, or improvisation, among others, are redefining service encounters and ecosystems. Discussions of human-nonhuman relations are challenging user-centered design approaches.
These processes explicitly or implicitly question service research and practices regarding the focus of its activities: services.
What (how, who or when) is a service?
It has been a learning process that includes academic and non-academic knowledge and highlights contrasts between alternative and mainstream practices, which may increasingly lead to new theoretical developments and political consequences.
Service designers and innovators may use their skills to hear multiple voices and ideas, get entangled in their localities, and navigate unexpected flows to evidence new service meanings.
ServDes.2023 aims to explore new perspectives on these continually reframed questions and their consequences on service design theory and practices.
Rio de Janeiro is the location of ServDes.2023. The city is economically driven by the service sector, composed of formally designed service provisions and a meshwork of informal, imprecise, improvised, unacknowledged services. Different social groups and workers collide or dialogue in various public or private spaces. This location offers immersive experiences on multiple aspects of the service phenomena, supporting the conference’s central theme.