Academic Working Group: Service design education and new paradigm shift in a changing world

Designers face a world of emergencies of crises through disasters, wars, refugees, and pandemic. The elements of the crisis are not purely technical or related to the quantity of available resources left on the planet: the crisis is also in society, in its inequalities, in the gap between social groups, genders, opportunities, social and economic conditions, not only between countries, but also within countries, in the same city, or in the same neighborhood. We see that designers, whose activity is embedded in the existing production and consumption system, are no longer a part of the solution, but rather a part of the problem of sustainability.
In this is a thematic workshop there will be discussed about the role or position of service design in the world that is in crises and in constant change. We see that there is a need to review the current paradigms how design is being educated today. While design research is clearly looking for a paradigm change, design education has often kept a conservative position.
In the workshop we wish to open discussion in the following questions: Can fundamental principles of liberal economy be overcome? For instance, is there an alternative to profit to evaluate design innovation? Are there alternative currencies that can measure social qualities? Is this currency equally valid when working for private and public sectors (and should those sectors be considered as separated)? Is the concept of social quality the same in different cultural contexts?