Between servitude and collaboration. A service design choice? In the framework of the ServDes Conference in Milano, next June, DESIS will also organise and coordinate (the 19th June afternoon) a workshop. Here below we anticipate a summary of its introduction. Please have a look and, if you are planning to come to the ServDes conference, sign up for it. If not, please, send us your feedback and thoughts on the topic it proposes (to info@desisnetwork.org)
 
20 years ago we started to talk about the upcoming service society. Now the service society is here but, at least in its mainstream, it is entirely different from what we had imagined. It is a fluid mesh of interactions colonised by neoliberal ideas and practices in which services are evolving towards a new form of servitude: “the state of being completely subject to someone more powerful” (Oxford Dictionary). That is, for what the new services are concerned: services based on encounters where one of the interlocutors (the service deliverer) is utterly subject to the power of platforms, i.e. of the algorithms on which it is based and, behind it, of the platform owners.
 
Until now, criticisms of this painful state of things have been mainly made discussing the economic environments in which it happens. That is, the platform economy (i.e. the economy based on digital platforms) and the deriving gig economy (“a way of working that is based on people having temporary jobs or doing separate pieces of work, each paid separately, rather than working for an employer” - Cambridge Dictionary).
 
In this DESIS Workshop, we intend to discuss the implications of all this regarding service design and of design for social innovation.
 
To start this discussion, we will propose two working hypotheses and some related questions:

• The new servitude is the results of a user-centred design carried to extremes. That is, to “serve” the user at best-regarding efficiency and costs, at the expenses of the service deliverer, that is reduced – in fact – at the state of servitude.  If so: should the notion of user-centred design be abandoned to adopt a user-and-deliverer-centered one? Alternatively, imagining users and delivers as part of a broader community, should it be shifted towards a community-centred design?
•  The new servitude highlights how much the service encounters are also an issue of power: the power of each interlocutor (including service user, service deliverer and platform owner).  If so: can design help in creating conditions for a fair balance of power between them? What could be, in this case, the service designer’s power?

What we would like to do is to start from these working hypotheses and questions to discuss if and how the new generation of collaborative services that in this same period, driven by the transformative social innovation, have emerged, could give directions on how to oppose the gig economy main trend and the new servitude it generates.

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A new Thematic Cluster on design for city making

Ezio Manzini      29.11.2107

We are currently working on a new DESIS Thematic Cluster to investigate if and how design for city-making can play a role in generating, or regenerating, urban fabric. We already did a workshop on this theme in Shanghai, organised by the Tongji DESIS Lab, and a new one will take place in Barcelona (at the Elisava DESIS Lab) in December 2017. These two workshops, and the other which will follow in the next months, aim at clarifying the theme and the specific research question on which we will work in the next 2 years.

For sure this Thematic Cluster (TC) will be part of the Thematic Area (TA) of “Design and the City”, that is one of the 3 main areas that emerged in the DESIS Map.  In previous communications the difference between TAs and TCs has been already explained. In short, in our case, it is the following: the TA on Design and the City includes all the projects that have the keywords Design and City in their description. On the contrary TC on Design for City Making refers to design research activities, moving from a precise research question and having a clear hypothesis of work.

In this initial phase, that will last until the end of January, we are still working on a better definition of this research question and of the related hypotheses of work. The discussion is still open and open is also the possibility to participate (if you are interested, please get in touch with the DESIS Coordination: desis.coordination@gmail.com).

Given that, to indicate the state-of-the-art of the discussion on this TC, here below you will find the beginning of the draft document presently in discussion.

1. City-making concept includes projects with different social and political motivations and implications. That is, they can produce inequalities, segregation and commodification of the urban commons, or move in the opposite direction, reducing inequalities, creating a diversified and vibrant urban fabric. The projects moving in the first direction – that presently is the dominant ones – are driven by the interests of who considers the city, in all its aspects, as a marketable good (city as commodity).  The second direction is proposed, and shown in its concrete viability, by several cases of social innovation. They are driven by who see the city as a complex living entity, made of people, communities and places, the existence of which is based on a mesh of non-marketable systems (city as commons).
2. To think and developprojects capable to improve sustainability and resilience at the city or at the neighborhood scales, a two steps process has to be enhanced:

• To improve the city-making characterof the projects, considering their rooting in a place, their openness to different people and communities and their links with other projects.
• To improve their capability to regenerate commons,considering the quality of the social values they directly or indirectly produce.

Click here to find texts by Ezio Manzini (still under construction) that has been written on the basis of formal and informal discussions and seminars on this topic that took place inside DESIS Network, in the period October 2017- March 2018. The files will be progressively up-dated and up-graded following the evolution of the whole Thematic Cluster project.