Summary
In this panel discussion, Dr. Amanda Woolley, Christian Basson, and Dr. Luke Roberts explore advancing service design through a humanistic and systems-oriented lens. Amanda highlights the importance of making change human from first principles, emphasizing autonomy, competence, and social connectedness rooted in self-determination theory. She stresses the challenge of balancing humility and confidence when collaborating within complex systems and warns against tokenistic participation. Christian reflects on systems leadership, underscoring the need to question power distribution, underlying design values, and expanding human-centered design to encompass ecosystem and life-centered approaches, particularly addressing environmental implications. He discusses design’s unique position to enable transdisciplinary collaboration and calls for revisiting design’s humanist roots amid global challenges. Luke adds a critical perspective on systems as coercive and potentially weaponizable, advocating for vigilance about what emerges from design interventions and encouraging designers to speak truth to power and track systemic trajectories beyond project scope. He promotes considering multiple intelligences, such as biomimicry and play, to foster creativity and resilience. The conversation champions interdisciplinary approaches, ethics awareness, and sustaining hope through community, urging designers to navigate system vertigo and power dynamics thoughtfully while advancing service design with both practical and speculative future thinking.
Key Insights
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Design should embed humanity from the start rather than shoehorning it back into dehumanizing systems.
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Service designers must balance humility with confidence to collaborate genuinely and create space for others.
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Systems can coerce and distort, so emergence from design interventions can have both positive and harmful outcomes.
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Power operates through controlling attention and resources; where designers draw boundaries, they exercise real influence.
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Design leadership is moving toward ecosystem and life-centered frameworks to address broader environmental and social contexts.
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Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches are crucial for tackling complexity and connecting concrete and abstract system layers.
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Ethical reflection on the values underpinning design practice is necessary to avoid perpetuating harmful systems.
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Service designers must anticipate systems’ trajectories and understand who holds and sustains the energy needed for change.
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More-than-human perspectives (e.g., biomimicry and games) offer new modes of intelligence and creativity for advancing design.
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Sustaining hope and community support is vital for designers navigating the slow, unpredictable process of systemic change.
Notable Quotes
"We want to make this humanizing from first principles, not just stuff the humanity back in."
"You can’t show up with humility unless you have confidence in what you bring."
"Emergence is a moral judgment—you have to ask if what’s emerging is good or harmful."
"You can design the best service in the world but still be part of a terrible system."
"Power moves people’s attention, and that boundary drawing carries real influence in systems."
"Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is not act and remove energy from a harmful dynamic."
"Designers must speak truth to power, even if what they say is not what people want to hear."
"Design is uniquely positioned to enable interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration."
"Humanism is under pressure globally, so we have to revisit and rethink our humanistic design roots."
"Games and play help mitigate risk language and free creativity in complex systems."
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