Designers are being challenged to find new ways of engaging in broader socio-technical systems and, at the same time, emerging technologies are changing the practices of design. This course will extend the knowledge and methods of design based on 10 years of scholarship and practice that demonstrate a critical, participatory and speculative engagement with futures. This course will draw on theories around the posthuman and the more-than-human in order to understand new conceptualizations of knowledge and expertise, new inventive methodologies as well as new ethical and political concepts in the design. This course draws on examples including smart cities and autonomous vehicles, robots and the future of work, networked medical devices and computational fashion. This course will integrate new inventive methodologies such as autoethnography, thing ethnography and multispecies ethnography as well as design futures methods such as stories, scenarios, and experiences.

In the emerging context, characterised by the urgency of climate change, increased geo-political and economic tensions and the raise of pervasive technologies (such as artificial intelligences), service design practitioners are asked to face new important challenges, with increasingly higher complexity. When we design services, can we shift our focus from existing individual needs to tomorrow’s development for humans and the planet as a whole? How do we help organisations identify more sustainable service models and reduce their environmental, social and financial impact? How might we embed considerations on the short-term and long-term consequences services could generate, at multiple levels?
In the past years we have been conducting research at the interception among design and other disciplines (such as behavioural science, systems thinking and speculative approaches), with the intention to enhance our practice and refresh the tools and frameworks we use everyday with new perspectives. During the masterclass, we will walk you through the results of our exploration, and show through case studies how we have been augmenting our approach to service design with new techniques.
What if those experiments became the new standard, and we could more easily embed a conscious understanding of behaviours and systems development in our everyday projects?

Digital transformation of society has enabled a growing trend of datafication -turning most aspects of our lives into quantified data. What is the value and risk of leveraging new data-sets for service design? What design questions can data help answer? How can we unlock and leverage data for design in a societal responsible way? And how to develop partnerships that allow for more data driven design service? This Masterclass will explore these questions and reflect on the organizational and societal opportunities and implications of re-using data for service design.

Influence, shift, nudge, motivate, persuade, change… the words of design but the knowledge of behavioural science.
Behavioural science - the study of what people do, think, feel and why - is merging with design and birthing a new lens, approach and methods for solving problems. Behavioural design is being used to think differently about the smallest interactions and the biggest challenges of the modern age.
In this masterclass we will explore how the science of behaviour is applied to design. We will start by exploring the process end to end to discover how and when behavioural science is most useful to service design. Then we will zoom in and focus on key and specific areas so you can understand people and problems through a behavioural lens.
Expect to walk away from this masterclass with (some) science in your notebook and a new method in your toolkit.

Key takeaways:
- How behaviour mindsets can guide design.
- What the key scientific theories tell us about people's behaviour.
- When to apply behavioural science for impactful service design.
- Why behaviour thinking is needed to design services that change behaviour.
- Where to look for more information and resources.

In this session, we will explore why the tech driven "move fast and break things" mantra often leads to negative results when applied to complex social challenges. Drawing from real world cases in emerging markets, we will reflect on the allure of what has been called the "the reductive seduction of solving other people's problems" (Martin) and why addressing systemic challenges such as the plastics crisis or increasing inequality require much more than being "user centered" or practising "empathy".