Alison Prendiville

A Design Anthropology of Place in Service Design: A Methodological Reflection

ABSTRACT This paper proposes adopting a Design Anthropology perspective when considering the design of community based services for the elderly. Drawing on two Service Design projects located in the Byker area of Newcastle, which brought together Ordnance Survey, Age UK Newcastle and a Service Design postgraduate Masters programme, this perspective utilizes anthropologys ethnographic method and a specific anthropological theory, to expand Service Design discourses and reframe the importance of place and place-making in the design of community services. The paper is informed by Tim Ingold and a phenomenological perspective to explore notions of life as lived to reveal alternative conceptual frames that can often be overlooked in Service Design. These methods, and concepts adopted from anthropology, both reveal and theorize the messiness of everyday life. The work goes on to examine the challenges to commensurate these community practices, with the values that the research revealed and to integrate them into viable services of the elderly.

Antimicrobial resistance: join us for a fresh approach

This is a comment piece for a national journal highlighting the potential for new approaches to addressing the problem of AMR.

Anatomy of local government/design education collaboration

Abstract The Public Collaboration Lab (PCL) is an action research partnership between the London Borough of Camden (LBC) and the University of the Arts London, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The research explored the potential for, and value of, strategic collaboration between design education (DHE) and local government (LG), and how design research and practice can contribute to service, policy and social innovation in the LG context. The project prototyped and piloted a new way of working that identified and leveraged synergies in the operational objectives of LG and the learning objectives (research and teaching) of DHE. The poster shares findings from the research in the form of an ‘anatomy’1 of LG/DHE collaboration, which articulates and visualizes the internal workings of LG/DHE. The ‘anatomy’ serves as a resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to reflect on collaborative projects by inputting data to the models to visualize their activities; and as a generative tool, providing a set of templates that focus discussion around the planning of collaborative projects.

Public collaboration lab

This exhibition introduces the Public Collaboration Lab (PCL), a one-year research project that explores the potential for, and value of, strategic collaboration between design education and local government to better engage council staff and the citizens they serve, in the development and application of design-led approaches to social challenges and to inform policy. It displays a selection of practice-based PCL collaborative design engagement tools that provide a site for argument, debate and exchange between participants in the process of creative engagement. Taking these tools as a starting point, the mini-workshop explores the various definitions of such tools (thing, boundary object, cultural probe, etc.), discussing their role in participatory design research.