Lenses of Care – revisiting interconnectedness in service design

Abstract

This paper focuses on the connections and resonances between an ethical and philosophical concept of care and service design. The paper contributes, on one hand, to discussions on service design seen as a dynamic discipline that addresses relations and responsibilities when shaping our futures. On the other, it highlights the concept of care in our everyday choices, and how it matters in learning context. We first frame our take on service design and our motivation to recalibrate the focus on human-centred design by enhancing, with the concept of care, the understanding of interconnectedness. Then, we introduce, based on literature, three lenses to view the everyday manifestations of care through different perspectives and horizontal depths. We also introduce an experiment within a university course on service design where we included an additional, value-based layer, on ‘care’. The three lenses are then used in discussing and students’ learning reflections and design outcomes, as well as the potential and challenges of the experiment as a transformative experience. Based on our observations, we propose that care as a concept can support in bringing deeper understanding on interrelatedness to service design education.