Essi Kuure

A situation-aware safety service for children via participatory design

Children are mostly neglected as technology end users, even though they have needs and requirements that should be taken into account in the design of new products and services. This paper introduces a process for a designing situation-aware safety service for children with a unique combination of novel participatory tools, a brainstorming workshop, and scenario writing. The design process includes five phases where the service design team, with multi-science expertise, uses the participatory design tools to gather the needs, fears, and hopes from the end users in the very early phases of the design. We report the lessons learned from the usage of the design process by the pupils, their parents and teachers from one primary school in Finland. We used publicity via the news in local and provincial newspapers, radio, and TV to receive feedback and acceptance from the local society. The design process proved to be powerful and it enabled the gathering and receiving of valuable feedback from both end users and the local society.

Co-design in action with children: using service design approach to solve a Namibian reading culture challenge

The main goal of the workshop is to ideate different possible service solutions to a Namibian reading culture challenge collaboratively with academics, designers, local stakeholders and children. This workshop allows participants to engage themselves in service prototyping, making use of the SINCO service prototyping approach. The main idea of a service prototype is to concretize ideas and communicate quickly and inexpensively a service proposition for different stakeholders. At its best a service prototype is at the same time a tool for learning, communication and change management. Participants can learn by doing how service prototyping takes form and suits to solving local challenges which are by nature networked and touch many different stakeholders. Participants can come to this workshop with their children. The outcome of the workshop will be a service prototype which will be shared with the wider PDC community.

Social design for service: building a framework for designers working in the development context

Abstract There is an evident need to shift from focusing merely on designers’ tasks and methods towards taking a more holistic approach to socially responsible design. In order to do this, this paper looks firstly in retrospect at the global design research work done by the World Design Research Group and secondly examines an on-going research project in the development context. In both cases, the connections and differences between social design and service design are highlighted. As a concrete outcome this paper proposes a framework that can be applied to the development context. In other words, in design cases where the aim is to collaborate, share knowledge and experiences as well as co-design change in a multinational group. The framework itself gives designers an understanding of how to both navigate in the development field and work for improving the livelihoods of communities.

Co-design in action: solving a Namibian unemployment challenge with service design approach and stakeholders

This workshop aims to address service prototyping as a way to deal with public service development challenges, in this case a Namibian design challenge of unemployment. The main idea of a service prototype is to concretize ideas and communicate quickly and inexpensively a service proposition for different stakeholders. At its best a service prototype is at the same time a tool for learning, communication and change management. This workshop allows participants to engage themselves in service prototyping, making use of the SINCO service prototyping approach. Participants can learn by doing how service prototyping takes form and suits to solving local challenges which are by nature networked and touch many different stakeholders. The main goal of the workshop is to ideate and concretize diverse possible service solutions to the unemployment challenge in a team.