Experio Lab is inviting to the Experio Seminars. Once a month we’ll invite interesting researchers to talk about service design, service logic and user-driven services in public sector.

Designing interventions to improve well-being and livelihoods is challenging because poverty is multidimensional and plays out in complex, adaptive social-ecological systems, where behaviours and practices at the local level can have unintended consequences elsewhere in the system. In such contexts, linear approaches to designing development interventions are insufficient. Service design has emerged as a human-centred, integrative approach to designing services and systems in complex settings, but knowledge gaps remain on how service design can be used to address development challenges in the Global South. In this talk, Fiona presents highlights from her recent PhD thesis about the use of service design for designing development interventions in complex social-ecological contexts. Three case studies of development interventions were used: in two of the cases, a clean cookstove intervention in Kenya and an insurance product for small-scale farmers in Uganda, a service design approach was combined with quantitative methods. In the third case study, participatory backcasting was used to inform a long-term plan for energy transition for an off-grid community in Machakos, Kenya. The contributions are useful for service design researchers and practitioners interested in how service design can be used alongside other disciplines to support long-term development objectives. For the development community, the contributions demonstrate a radically different approach to designing interventions where complexity, messiness and non-linearity are embraced.

Recording from December 15th 2023