In the pursuit of decolonising Dominant Service Design -three reflexive stories

Abstract

Following decolonising calls in affiliated critical discourses, this chapter contends with colonial logics inside commonly used frameworks, like Service Blueprints, to show how seemingly benign values of neutrality, transportability, accessibility, and universality can disguise and perpetuate an absent consciousness of harm. The authors interrogate how such symptoms of Dominant Service Design remain pervasively invisible in its thinking and approaches. In alerting the design community of these underlying mechanisms, we aim to heighten vigilance in what we all may be participating in unthinkingly. This is one contribution. However, entrenched structures cannot be ‘resolved’ through ‘alternatives’, and theoretical critique has its limitations. As such, the authors explore analogous contribution through practices of writing accountability. We speak from our intersectional, geo-political positionings and amplify our dissimilarities as plural and distinct commitments entangled with lands, customs, ecologies and relationalities that are important to our designing, being and becoming-with. This is a practice of ethical accounting, to trouble orthodoxies of replicable and universalising methodologies, which in design is achieved by evacuating the personhood. By ‘walking-the-talk’ we show this as one practice of decolonising to resist performing the standard expectations of knowledge. Sharing this accounting becomes an invitation to others to witness and join in such endeavours, as a reorientation from the Dominant Service Design, to embrace unbounded and uncertain conditions of plural realities.

A collaborative book chapter with Yoko Akama, Tristan Schultz and Ricardo Sosa

Book available here

Pre-Copyedit Jan 2025 version available here