Interview in collaboration with Alberto Dell’Aquila
originally published on LinkedIn on January 25, 2024
The focus of this article is to bring some light on the current world of Education & Training that prepares the designers of the future. I wanted to try to understand the main areas of theoretical study and teaching approaches.
Services are integral components of our modern daily existence.
We can find thousands of different Services in just half day.
During your travels, for example, the airline company provides value by offering the Service of facilitating your journey from one place to another.
Similarly, when you engage in shopping, the grocery store extends value through its Service, enabling you to acquire essential goods.
Approximately 80% of the global economy (*) is comprised of Services.
Service Design employs human-centered design principles to create enduring and appealing services that adapt to evolving consumer needs.
This approach enhances customer experiences, fosters successful innovation, and adds business value. It is applicable across various sectors, including retail, banking, transportation, health, and education, capable of transforming services in each domain.
But should Service Design only be focused on creating Business outcomes?
While creating business outcomes is a significant aspect of Service Design, it should not be the sole focus. Service Design is a holistic approach that aims to improve and innovate the entire Service Experience for users, customers, and stakeholders.
While business outcomes are essential, service design should also consider other factors like Innovation (Service Design is a creative process that encourages innovation. Focusing solely on business outcomes may hinder the exploration of new ideas and alternative solutions that could lead to improved services and user experiences), and Ethical Considerations (Service Designers should also be mindful of the ethical implications of their designs.Prioritizing ethical considerations can contribute to long-term sustainability and positive brand perception, which may impact business outcomes in the broader sense).
Effective training enables students to explore the interconnected nature of various elements. Nothing exists in isolation, and our connection with the world is shaped by the context of our interactions.
Subsequently, students start conceptualizing the world as a collection of interactions and experiences, moving beyond a focus on mere objects and artifacts.
Services thrive on interactions with people, and adopting this perspective is said to be a manifestation of empathy. It is crucial for students to consider individuals, understanding their actions, words, and emotions.
It makes already sense at this point declare some information about the Guest for this article:
Rashid Owoyele, Transdisciplinary Designer based in Berlin, with over 10 years of experience in Service Design & Social (Societal) Innovation with a solid background as University Lecturer, Dozent, and Guest Faculty member across many Institutions and Geographies and Facilitator, specialized in Equitable & Just Design.
Rashid’s work is dedicated to making a meaningful impact in the health and educational sectors. With a keen focus on individuals, Rashid goes beyond the surface, delving deep into the complexities of human actions, words, and emotions. Their work extends far beyond the conventional boundaries of design, seeking to understand the unique challenges and aspirations of each person involved in the healthcare and educational experiences.
By empathetically immersing themselves in the lives of individuals, Rashid strives to create solutions that are not only efficient and effective but also profoundly human-centric.
Rashid’s commitment is to transcend the limitations of traditional approaches, considering the nuanced aspects of human behavior to design services that truly resonate with and enhance the well-being of individuals across health and educational domains.
Before jumping to the conversation with Rashid I want highlight what I noticed (based on my research on various courses and master’s programs) — it’s evident that today’s professional Design practice emphasizes four key skill areas:
1. Human Skills involve effective collaboration, observation, and the ability to influence organizational culture. This training goes beyond facilitation, emphasizing the importance of students developing the skills to observe and impact organizational culture, recognizing biases and established value systems.
2. Technical skills leverage technology for data capture, exploring social media behaviors, and interactions with brands.
3. Quantitative skills are crucial for interfacing with engineers and managers, playing a vital role in project planning and evaluating success. They also enhance the interpretation of qualitative research data, including stakeholder emotional responses, adding value to professional practice.
4. Business Skills set service design apart by creating experiences aligned with organizational capabilities and financial viability. Service designers are expected to think holistically, design on-brand solutions, and demonstrate measurable impacts on project ecosystems, showcasing a strong business acumen.
Let’s now chat with Rashid:
Hi Rashid, please introduce yourself and tell us more about your background and how you started your career as a Transdisciplinary Designer.
As a youth I lived through many traumatic experiences, including 3 floods which decimated my childhood home. Those floods were the lack of foresight in urban planning and a disregard for the scientific knowledge about the relationship between coordinated human behavior and the environment. As I began university in pursuit of a bachelors degree, I found myself pursuing a degree in Environmental Science and Health in Public Health. After 6 semesters of full-time studies while working full-time in a variety of research roles, I started to sense that the work I was doing in public health was more about counting instances of harm than it was about intervening to pursue better outcomes.
It was at this point that I got a golden opportunity to design my own undergraduate curriculum. I combined a minor in Public Health with humanities, arts, and sciences to develop a course of study in Environmental Ethics & Design. That opportunity led to me getting the chance at earning my masters in fine arts in Transdisciplinary Design. As a part of the second-ever cohort of students in that program I felt both burdened and privileged to establish my own unique pursuit of study. My background in environmental ethics and public health translated into professionalizing my engagement with social and economic justice through participatory design practices — including service design in pursuit of social innovation (society can be limitlessly improved upon!).
You taught in several institutions like Parsons The New School for Design, University of Cincinnati, Welingkar Institute of Management, Institute for Future Education Entrepreneurship and Leadership, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and SRH Berlin School of Design and Communication. Over the years which are the biggest changes that you noticed in terms of area of focus, teaching and learning process?
At the beginning of my career I worked in the area of aging research as a research assistant and human subject interviewer; where I also co-authored a research paper. Shortly after that and several other research oriented roles I worked as a career coach. That opportunity led me into a skillset that provided me with great opportunities. Including getting into my dream school for my master’s program studying Transdisciplinary Design. There I developed my practice at the conjunction of social and environmental justice and design. After I moved to Berlin in 2015 my career took a turn towards consulting. As a consultant I used my research skills to consult many of Germany’s largest companies. It was here that I got a peak inside the companies and understood how the design of the company itself shaped the lived experiences of not only their clients and consumers, but the workers and everyone in between.
Between jobs I started doing freelance work and got exposed to cooperatives that offer freelancers benefits through models of Genossenschaften. As the worlds I was working in began to cross and veer, I was able to work on digital products while teaching about social innovation to my students. As a teacher I was frustrated with myself for teaching about subjects that I had been, in my own career, facing a lot of difficulty in implementing. It became clear that the potential of our emerging technologies, like platforms for example, were destined to replicate and reinforce the less-than-desirable constructions that the social and environmental justice communities and practitioners were rallying against. A gap in implementation and dissemination of our best knowledges appeared before me and I started to question how institutional structures maintained a status quo which, for much of the global population, is incredibly harmful.
As I began to dive into what was happening with the community around Platform Cooperativism, I knew that this marriage of institutional design and activism was an area of interest for me. I began drinking in all of the content that I could find, and initiating discussions and relationships with the folks whose work I was reading. That led me to doing a research project that I called Society of Owners in 2019. During this experiment I had invited a group of young professionals to imagine how they might cooperate together testing which kinds of design tools and methods might build trust, establish share visions and values, and be useful in shaping the way we would be organizing ourselves around shared goals. With the support of a friend and mentor, Ela Kagel of Supermarkt Berlin (a home to alternative economy and digital transformation discourse) I created a space for ‘cooperativist futuring.’ That project did not live more than the year that I had blocked for it, and the ten thousand dollars that I had used of my own savings was not coming back. I did however learn a really good lesson — ownership can not be given. Like the parent that pushes their child to buy their own first car to ensure responsible driving and care, the ritual of claiming ownership for ones’ self needed to be part of the experience. Also, as a result of that project I was invited to a research role which would allow me to push that exploration further.
You spent almost 3 years at The Berlin University of Arts as Researcher and Docent. Please tell us more about your experience here and your projects during this time.
Due to the nature of academia, I had to step back at this point. I had to ask my self how I could more rigorously engage community in a new way to generate empirical data about the problem. How could I turn this into a real science experiment? I used service design and design research as the ground basis for the research I did at The Weizenbaum Institute, check here: https://www.weizenbaum-institut.de/en/persons-details/p/rashid-owoyele/#page=1&sort=date
How do you see the teaching sector (for topics like Service Design, Urbanism, Sustainability and Social Innovation) in the next 10 years?
If I am able to achieve my goals, the transformation that I would like to see in the teaching of design will incorporate a stronger intention of transcending the boundaries of our existing industry-shaped disciplines. At this moment, the schools of thought around transdisciplinarity have been slowly developing a discourse which has sought to define what the scope of transformation beyond disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices could achieve. I would like to further support the development of a theoretical framing for what transdisciplinarity means. By making the intentions of transdisciplinarity more clearly consumable by would-be developers of such approaches my aim is to further support the application of transdisciplinarity as a means of liberation and pursuit of justice — environmental-, social-, and economic-justice. To do so, I propose 2 movements toward a paradigmatic transformation.
The first is “post-disciplinarity,” and the second is “anti-disciplinarity.” Post-disciplinarity having to do with transforming the world of knowledge production which emerges beyond the exclusionary boundaries of a divided world of silos across academia and its machines — here we see individual practitioners who have trained across a variety of disciplinary boundaries and an observable benefit of cross-disciplinary training for individuals. Anti-disciplinarity thereby being a concept which positions itself within the interpretation of the value inherent to different ways of knowing or coming to know and restoring value back into community; acknowledging those with lived-experience for example who might be considered “un-disciplined” experts (one might extend this in economic terms to the area of ‘care work’ or ‘indigenous knowledges’ for example).
On which project are you currently focused?
Directly as a result of that work I am currently coauthoring a text book chapter on service design with a former professor of mine who teaches Transdisciplinary Design, Lara Penin. Together we are authoring about the imminent opportunity to modify service design in pursuit of the needs of workers. We have witnessed the harm of user-centered design and acknowledge the imperative to engage more stakeholders in the process of producing their relationships through sharing relational power. I am also in the process of growing a company the employs these practices towards transitioning other actors and organizations towards more equitable futures. Design is not only about making decisions of aesthetic and form, but also the shaping of meanings and outcomes — like justice. Our world is made of designed and inherited constructions. Many worlds existing simultaneously with high degrees of complexity across various scales of observation and interconnectedness. Transekt( https://transekt.agency), an agency for Transdisciplinary Design and Social Innovation, aims to cut across these topographies and pursue knowledge production through creative and critical wisdom.
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More info about Rashid:
