Start Date
6-10-2025 9:00 AM
End Date
8-10-2025 7:00 PM
Description
Despite its claims of driving transformation in service systems, service design often ends up reproducing the status quo and normalizing others into dominant social expectations. If we want to move away from the circulation of hegemonic structures within the practice, the service design discipline needs to be challenged. This paper explores how service design can be undisciplined to create a grammar of possibility for making service systems otherwise. Drawing on experiences from an experimental 7-week service design research and education collaboration with hospital-based mental health services in Norway, this research presents a queer framework that reveals the entanglement of normative and counter-normative pressures as well as contradictory desires when attempting at designing otherwise. The framework highlights the failings that ensue when we play with, or dis/order, traditional service design. This research offers an opening for anti-disciplinary service design knowledge and expansive ways of untraining, undoing and forgetting that attempt to resist mastery in service design education.
Citation
Vink, J., Encinas, E., Chan, D.,and Bhattacharya, S.(2025) Playing with Failure: A Queer Framework for Making Service Systems Otherwise.. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/servdes/servdes2025/researchpapers/35
Playing with Failure: A Queer Framework for Making Service Systems Otherwise
Despite its claims of driving transformation in service systems, service design often ends up reproducing the status quo and normalizing others into dominant social expectations. If we want to move away from the circulation of hegemonic structures within the practice, the service design discipline needs to be challenged. This paper explores how service design can be undisciplined to create a grammar of possibility for making service systems otherwise. Drawing on experiences from an experimental 7-week service design research and education collaboration with hospital-based mental health services in Norway, this research presents a queer framework that reveals the entanglement of normative and counter-normative pressures as well as contradictory desires when attempting at designing otherwise. The framework highlights the failings that ensue when we play with, or dis/order, traditional service design. This research offers an opening for anti-disciplinary service design knowledge and expansive ways of untraining, undoing and forgetting that attempt to resist mastery in service design education.