Design is Service

Design is service —not manipulating, nudging, coercing, persuading…

The interrelationship that binds, animates, and defines a design capable

system is service. Service is a contractual relationship where purpose and

intention is blended with instrumental skill, judgement and agency (Nelson and

Stolterman 2000). Service is a word that has many meanings in different

contexts. It has a sense of ennoblement at the same time that it has negative

connotations for the reasons given by James Hillman (Hillman 1995):

Service offends deep strata of human dignity. We may

all want service, but who wants to give it? For service still

means menial service (not banking, brokering, telephoning,

teaching, installing, diagnosing or writing). The first trouble

lies in the word, which invites in it cousins—serf, servile,

servant, servitude, servility, all descendants from the

common Latin ancestor, servus, slave. Service, as it is

defined in our culture, is hardly empowering, or

empowering only to those persons who can command

service and the system for which we slave.

James Hillman

Service

Kinds of Power

Pp. 66-67,

In education one studies the liberal arts, not the servile arts, a

representative and enduring cleaving of mind from body and spirit from

matter. It is representative as well of the aversion and fear of submissive

relationships of control, in contrast to control over one's own self interests.

Service is perceived as putting one’s self in an inferior role at the beck and

call of demands issuing from above or below depending on your station

point.

These service relationships are without much appeal to anyone except

martyrs or those who willingly enjoy sacrificing their own self-interest for

the benefit of others. However, service can be seen in a more positive and

more appealing light, as there are other systemic, service relationships that

do not require self-sacrifice or martyrdom.

Service can be defined as a self-referential, systemic relationship as in

self-serving. In the search for truth (scientific, artistic or religious) one serves

ones own purposes i.e. artists express their own feelings and emotions while

scientists follow their own curiosity and passion and believers search for a

true god(s) and metaphysical invariance.

From a design perspective, service is defined as other-serving. Design

service is the quality of empathy, embodied in design communication, which

is mutual rather than unilateral. Service, from a design perspective, is very

different from the kind of empathic relationship employed in helping or

fixing as explained by Rachel Remen ((Remen 1996)):

Serving is different from helping. Helping is based on

inequality; it is not a relationship between equals…. Service

is a relationship between equals…. Helping incurs debt.

When you help someone they owe you one. But serving, like

healing is mutual. There is no debt.

Rachel Naomi Remen

In the Service of Life

Noetic Science Review

pp 24-25

Design service is defined by the contractual (formal or informal)

relationships of mutual and diverse benefit. In a relationship where there is

an exchange of value of equivalencies there is no inequity, inferiority,

domination, obligation, or unilateral control. Design, as service, is dependent

on the presence of an authentically empathic system of relationships.