Flipping the latest Design research journal, which taken from yesterday’s SVID (Sverige Industrial Design foundation) mingle, one of the paper immediately catches my eyes: A phenomenological view to co-designing services. The central framework of the paper draws from Tim Ingold’s phenomenological work, to inject his concepts into the service design discourse to lift us, literally and metaphorically, into richer mode of perceiving.
” In building on his work, it can help us re-situate services as an organic, co-created process and see co-designing as a journey and process of transformation in how we design our world, and ourselves , with others.”
“Phenomenologists’ see knowledge as active, created in the living moment and affective, bodily encounters in our world.”
” we argue that the craft of designing service is not about better mastery of methods or use of tools, but brought by a gradual attunement of action and perception through an active engagement with the constituents of his or her surroundings (Ingold, 2000)”
The paper talked about how evolving, organic solutions taking place, it comes from inside, a daily interaction between self and surrounding. It reminds me of a Japanese architect, compared how century old villages evolve and how modern city are planned and built. It is from a social perspective of how design can do and to be. On the other side, as “Design is an intensely commercial practice” and the emphasis of “what we can do to the world”, applied service design are methodological, analytically and repeatable, which are effectively taking account of users’ needs and superb for incremental change. But what I want to discuss here is the long term, organic and evolving way of designing and being.
Yesterday I had a lovely discussion about “long term perspective” and “project base”with people from one of the communities in Stockholm. It is not hard to make a project happen, what is hard is to embed a constant innovate culture and a pull to do so. I start to reflect on my thoughts on “involving children in designing public service meanwhile as a way to teach children design”, in terms of implementation and approach? As reading continues, I found some interesting relevant points in the article:
Ingold’s work on mapping is apposite to the co-designing of geomedia services, where the “everyday knowing” and opening-up of stories so locally bound, is critical of designing services.
Co-designing needs to be firmly rooted in its location, time and people and “grow out” organically from rich engagements and deep interactions over time.
As design researchers, it is our responsibility to curb our tendencies to detach methods from enactment, embedment and performance, and remind ourselves to re-stitch it back into the “meshwork” of living, re-connected to the lives and contexts of people, places and time.
What if designing is what children constantly do as a way to consciously actively interact and changing the surrounding and everyday life? and then city planners or traffic office for example, implements the insight or the evolved solutions? If children’s design course can be designed in a way to provoke these topics that public sectors face but in a continuously, situated way? instead of a “pre-designed proposals” and go through the separated “dots” in a certain time span? From pedagogical perspective, process is more important the product, and teaching children how to think is more important to be correct.(Reggio). I reflect on the saying “involving children in the design process”. “Involving” indicates children are passively involved into the pre-set design process. According the thinking above, maybe “embed” is a better word, to describe: embed designing public service through everyday interaction.
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