Including natural beyond-human agency in Service Design process

Abstract

Service design (SD) operates within a professional culture that has systematically excluded the living world from its stakeholder frameworks. Despite growing ecological awareness among practitioners, the discipline continues to produce methods, tools, and processes oriented almost exclusively toward human actors - a structural condition that this thesis identifies as both a research gap and an urgent practical problem. This research asks how SD can integrate natural beyond-human (BH) stakeholders into collaborative design processes, what barriers prevent that integration, how service designers currently conceptualize stakeholders, and what representational approaches and tools might make ecological inclusion possible.

The research draws on five methods: autoethnography, a survey of twenty SD students and practitioners, three expert interviews with purposively selected designers, participant observation across six more-than-human (MTH) design research encounters, and framework analysis. From which the findings suggest that the entry point to ecological inclusion matters as much as methodological depth - that framing and accessibility shape who can participate and how far the process can go. The thesis argues that incremental normalization from realistic starting positions is more likely to change the discipline than prescribing approaches that most practitioners cannot reach from where they currently stand.

The proposed solution that supports this is Designing With: A Positioning Framework for Ecological Inclusion, a three-stage instrument that moves practitioners from project context assessment through individual relational self-assessment to team method selection. The framework connects concept cards to specific positional conditions, making method choice accountable to the designer's actual starting position rather than to an idealized version of what MTH design should look like.