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of something like discovery phase that many of us still use in defining our
design process. We are not discovering anything, we are just getting to
know - it is not a safari, we are getting into peoples' lives so we need to
establish more trust-based - real relationships, rather than just extractive
practices as many of my students will call it.
Speaking of extractive practices and humanising approaches and
thinking and doing, I link to point four here which is designing for care
and solidarity. Here, as a service designer, I think about service a lot. I
think about service as really the basic form of human care as it's written
here and connecting us to the basic form of humanity. The other image
that I didn't include here that comes to mind is the idea of the bone, the
femur as a famous anthropologist talks about, the healed femur is the
first sign of civilisation because somebody took the time to actually care
for a person, to heal a bone, that takes six weeks to heal and that is
really when humans became humans. Throughout history, I put many
examples of imagery that, throughout cultures and ages, the idea of work
and service to others, as related to care.
However, as we think about the services for design, the platforms
for system, the systems we design, the majority of our work, the majority
of the groups and parts of society we don't really serve as designers in
the market, are related to what Cheryl Buckley, a design historian, calls
exterior structures, transportation systems, government, housing,
planning and this kind of industry. However, she is calling us to think
about how do we design services in our every day lives and caring for one
another, caring for parents, caring for their children, or caring for an
elderly parent or relatives, being a parent, running a home and so on. A
lot to do with reproductive labour for sure. What she is saying is why have
we, as service designers, looked into only those specific industries, rather
than look at this kind of every day live services? Don't they deserve to be