Abstract
This article offers a feminist pragmatist vision for service design educators and practitioners that seeks to cultivate participatory place-based systemic change through cross-cultural and intergenerational counter-storytelling efforts. After summarizing the story of the Power+Place Collaborative as a service design case study, the article outlines findings from a four-year, mixed-method study. Findings from this initiative indicate that feminist pragmatist practices can cultivate significant changes across social systems when such service design initiatives are sustained over time. Based on study findings, the article concludes by recommending a range of strategies found to be most useful for scaling cross-sector, participatory systems change.
Keywords
participatory design, feminist pragmatism, systems change, counter-storytelling, place-based community engagement
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2025.10
Citation
Lake, D.,and Marshall, S.(2025) Cultivating Cross-Cultural Community through Counter-storying: The Power+Place Collaborative, in Mahamuni, R., Onkar, P. (eds.), ServDes 2025: Empowering Diversity, Nurturing Lasting Impact, 6–10 October, Hyderabad, India. https://doi.org/10.21606/servdes2025.10
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Cultivating Cross-Cultural Community through Counter-storying: The Power+Place Collaborative
This article offers a feminist pragmatist vision for service design educators and practitioners that seeks to cultivate participatory place-based systemic change through cross-cultural and intergenerational counter-storytelling efforts. After summarizing the story of the Power+Place Collaborative as a service design case study, the article outlines findings from a four-year, mixed-method study. Findings from this initiative indicate that feminist pragmatist practices can cultivate significant changes across social systems when such service design initiatives are sustained over time. Based on study findings, the article concludes by recommending a range of strategies found to be most useful for scaling cross-sector, participatory systems change.