Student Forum
Service design meets Chinese culture
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06:30PM
Please be aware that multiple presentations will take place during this session commencing at 05:30PM AEDT and share the same zoom link. Check how presentations are clustered in the program spreadsheet when adding the calendar.
Service Design (SD) and Design Thinking (DT) share many pillars - both are human-centred, holistic, iterative, real, collaborative - and DT cognitive processes are widely used to design services. Both have Western roots and both are informed by culture (Thoring et al., 2014), therefore, Western culture is mirrored in how these processes are structured, comprehended and applied. With her research, the author aimed at gaining new understandings on the practice of SD outside Western culture. What happens when a Western thinking model and its application into the services sector are “moved” into a different culture? In order to create value, a process should be crafted for its users and their culture (Stickdorn et al., 2017); hence the hypothesis that China needs a Service Design process tailored to its unique way of thinking and context. The outcome is a process that considers the Chinese cultural and contextual characteristics and aims at guiding designers to create valuable services for that context. The key Chinese characteristics: the concepts of “connections” and “human value”, a fluid and flexible structure that reflects the Chinese synchronic perception of time, the pragmatic approach, team alignment moments to enhance teamwork. This aims at being a trigger project; many “Chinese barriers” relate to SD methods and methodologies such as brainstorming and ethnographic research (Ann, 2017). Further explorations could address these topics to widen the just started research.
Interestingly, although the research is focused on the Chinese context, this process can adapt to other cultural realities.
Europe (CET): 5th February 2021 7:30 am to 8:30 am
US (EST): 5th February 2021 1:30 am to 2:30 am
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Giulia Capriotti is a young product-service system designer; she attends a scientific high school that allows her to develop an analytical thought. Always fascinated by design, she obtains a Bachelor's degree in Industrial Design at Politecnico di Milano, but she wants to design complexity and have an impact on a larger scale. So she enrolls in the Product Service System master course at Politecnico di Milano; a year later she enters the double Master's degree program and moves to Shanghai, China, where she lives for a year and a half. During this experience, she matures her curiosity for the relationship between Service Design and culture, in particular the Chinese one, a topic that becomes her master thesis subject.
In 2019, after graduating in China, she also obtains the Italian degree in Product-Service System design.
