Daniela Sangiorgi

Design for services

This seminar was delivered on 29th February 2012 by Dr Daniela Sangiorgi, a lecturer in Design at Imagination Lancaster - a design-led research lab at Lancaster University. The presentation was hosted at Brunel University as part of the Human Centred Design Institute (HCDI) Research Seminar Series. Daniela is an internationally recognised scholar in the field of Service Design research, with one of the first PhDs in the field and is co-author of the book “Design for Services” (2011) by Gower. Her research focuses on the role of Design for Service Innovation. She has participated in EU research projects looking into methodologies and best practices for service design and social innovation and has more recently participated in a UK EPSRC funded research project on the role of design within healthcare clinical commissioning. Daniela has been working with local manufacturing SMEs and multinational organisations exploring scenarios, competences and tools for their development into service solution providers.

Integrating Evidence-Based Design and Experience-Based Approaches in Healthcare Service Design

Objective: To investigate the connections between, and respective contributions of, evidence-based and experience-based methods in the redesign of healthcare services. Background: Evidence-based medicine (EBM) preceded (and inspired) the development of evidence-based design (EBD) for healthcare facilities. A key feature of debate around EBM has been the question of interpretation of the guidance by experienced clinicians, to achieve maximum efficacy for individual patients. This interpretation and translation of guidelines—avoiding a formulaic approach, allowing for divergent cultural and geographical exigencies, creating innovative, context-specific solutions—is the subject of this discussion, which examines the potential for integration of evidence-based and experience-based approaches in the development of creative solutions to healthcare services in England. This paper examines Practice-Based Commissioning (PBC) in England, which devolves responsibility for commissioning new services for patients to frontline clinicians, relying on their understanding of patient needs at the local level. Methods: An 18-month project, funded by the Health and Care Infrastructure Research and Innovation Centre (HaCIRIC), examined PBC frameworks in England, investigating the impact of different models of governance on the development of service redesign proposals to answer the following questions: How do clinicians interpret the multiplicity of guidance from government agencies and translate this into knowledge that can be effectively used to redesign patient care pathways aligned with local healthcare priorities? How can understanding patient and staff “experiences” and key “touch points” of interaction with local healthcare services be used to provide a creative, customized solution to the design of healthcare services in a local, community-based framework?

Intelligent Mobility Systems: Some Socio-technical Challenges and Opportunities

Analysis of socio-technical challenges and opportunities around contemporary mobilities suggests new interpretations and visions for intelligent transport systems. Multiple forms of intelligence are required (but not easily compatible), transport is too narrow a term, and innovation results in new socio-technical systems. An exploration of cumulative, collective and collaborative aspects of mobility systems, allows us to sketch challenges and opportunities in relation to practices of collaboration, communication and coordination, literacies for creativity, comfort and control, citizenship and (lack of) a sense of crisis, concluding with a discussion of methodological implications.

A Human-Centred, Multidisciplinary, and Transformative Approach to Service Science: A Service Design Perspective

The increasing complexity and human centeredness of service systems raises new challenges to decision makers, requiring the integration of multidisciplinary efforts while addressing the dynamic reconfiguration of actors for value co-creation. This chapter uses a case study investigation into the practice of an Italian service design agency to expand on the understanding of service design as a human centred, multidisciplinary, and transformative approach for service system innovation. The study illustrates how service design can move from being a disciplinary field to become an overarching approach and a cultivated horizontal skill able to favour multidisciplinary integration; also the evolution in the understanding of service from a given market offering or output, to a dynamic condition of value exchange and co-creation, qualifies service design as an “accompanying” service for clients in their transformation journey that enables the collaborative co-creation of value; as a result of this exploratory case study, service design is depicted as a continuing, collaborative and flexible innovation approach that constantly adjusts depending on the level of engagement and alignment of the key partners and the need to nurture the evolving dynamics of value co-creation for service system transformation.

Moving towards a New View of Diagnostic Work: Some Implications

The diverse studies of diagnostic work in this book give shape to a new view of diagnostic work. They highlight just how much more than individual cognitive capability is needed, the close relationship between analysis and intervention, the often implicit nature of diagnosis, and the fact that there are several degrees or levels of diagnostic work. Different knowledges, motivations, skills and forms of expertise are mobilised in often collaborative and embodied encounters between people and objects. Matter and matters are made to speak in many ways through social, material and embodied practices. We would like to argue that this ‘new view’ of diagnostic work does not just ‘explain’ diagnosis in a more precise and sensitive manner. Indeed, in light of the rich descriptions in this book, the attempt to summarise the new view above exposes explanation as an unsatisfactorily abstract endeavour. The studies in this book, importantly, provide much more than explanation. They exhibit the specificities of diagnostic practices in different settings, some important intended and unintended consequences, moral and political implications, as well as opportunities for change.