The growing importance of services in the business sector as well as public sector has spurred research and practices for service design. This dissertation aims to provide a new design approach for a specific type of services called ‘collaborative services’. Collaborative services, defined as services in which final users collaborate to produce solutions for a common need (Jégou & Manzini, 2008), have drawn attention as ‘a driver in the transition towards a more sustainable society’ (Ibid.) and ‘an engine for wider societal transformation’ (Sangiorgi, 2011). Compared to standard services, collaborative services are characterized by a high level of user participation, and the role of users as ‘co-designer’ or ‘partner’ in service production. The high level of commitment required to the participants can be a major limit to the diffusion of collaborative services (Manzini, 2011), thus it is necessary to make collaborative services more accessible, effective, and more attractive. This research puts a particular focus on the last point – how to make collaborative services more ‘attractive’. Making a service more ‘attractive’ can be interpreted in many different ways. It may include designing visible parts of a service more appealing: or developing service offering to provide more benefits to participants: or making user experience more enjoyable. This dissertation approaches this question in terms of ‘pleasurablity’. According to Clatworthy (2011), pleasurability - how pleasurable the interaction is at the emotional level - is one of the three basic elements to make services desirable. The other two elements are utility - what the service does, or offers the customer at the functional level, and usability - how easy it is to interact with the service. Service interactions include two types of interaction; human-service interface (touchpoints) interactions, and human-to-human interactions. Although both of them have an important role in user experience, the distinctive characteristics of collaborative services make the latter (human-to-human interactions) play a particularly crucial role in the user experience. There exist a number of approaches to design interpersonal service interactions, but this research argues that there is a need for a new design approach. Firstly, design approaches developed based on the standard service model (e.g. service scripting) are not well applicable to collaborative services, as interpersonal interactions in the production of collaborative services are different from those in standard services. Participants of collaborative services cannot be defined as neither ‘the server’ nor ‘the served’ as the outcomes are reciprocally produced and shared by the participants. Consequently, interactions among them tend to be symmetrical (Manzini, 2009). Previous studies especially in the service marketing literature tend to focus on the action of a service provider to provide good service experience from a unilateral perspective (e.g. politeness, friendliness of a service provider to a user), but collaborative services need to be designed to support many-to-many, open-ended interactions. Early studies in the field of service design paid attention mainly on collaborative services rooted in local communities (e.g. Cipolla, 2007; Meroni, 2007; Jégou & Manzini, 2008). In these cases, the services are performed between community members who have a sense of solidarity, and good relations with each other from daily life. The interpersonal relations among members provide a solid ground for the operations of collaborative services. However, nowadays a growing number of collaborative services are based on the Internet, which enables anyone connected to the Internet to collaborate beyond geographical and social boundaries. In these cases, collaborative services are performed between participants who do not have pre-existing relationship, and service encounters tend to be ephemeral. While design research based on the studies of the former type of collaborative services have provided design approaches emphasizing highly intensive relational qualities (e.g. Cipolla’s framework of relational construction process consisting of acceptance -affirmation - confirmation), there is little research about how to design interpersonal service interactions of the latter type of collaborative services, which often include interactions between strangers. More importantly, most of the existing design approaches tend to focus on task-based interactions. Such approaches are useful in understanding and designing goal-oriented interactions from a perspective of efficacy, but overlook ‘fun-based modes of behaviors (Meroni & Sangiorgi, 2011)’ driven by enjoyment and emotions. This dissertation assumes the latter plays a significant role in making service experience more pleasurable, thus need to be taken into account in the design of service interactions. This dissertation aims to propose an alternative design approach to interpersonal service interactions that are applicable to various types of collaborative services, with a focus on pleasurability. Existing approaches to interpersonal service interactions rely on various theoretical foundations, ranging from cognitive psychology to activity theory, but the topic ‘pleasurability’ is rarely explored as a central subject. To seek a potential theoretical foundation to explore human interaction from the perspective of pleasurability, this dissertation takes ‘aesthetic experience’ approaches in the Interaction Design field (e.g. Petersen, et al., 2004; Overbeeke et al., 2002; Ross & Wensveen, 2010, Wright et al., 2008) as a point of reference. As the aesthetics-oriented perspectives to Interaction Design have shifted the focus of Interaction Design from designing usable system - with an emphasis on ‘efficiency’ and ‘transparency’ – to designing aesthetic experience and ‘creating involvement, experience, surprise and serendipity in interaction’ (Petersen, et al., 2004) – with focuses on concepts like ‘pleasure’ (Jordan, 2000), ‘enjoyment’ (Blythe et al., 2003), ‘intrigue’ (Petersen, et al. 2004) and ‘fun’ (Blythe & Hassenzahl, 2003), this research hypothesizes that adopting an aesthetics-oriented perspective to Service Design discipline may contribute to understand and design service interactions from a perspective of pleasurable interactions. In particular, this research pays attention on ‘Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002)’ as the potential theoretical foundation for a service design approach. Relational Aesthetics advocates the value of ‘sociability’, and the opportunities of ‘ways of being together’ beyond commodified human relations that we are surrounded by in daily life. The sociability manifested in Relational Aesthetics shows some differences from the concept of sociability in the design literature (e.g. Preece, 2000; Foucault et al, 2007; Norman, 2008). While sociability in the design literature is often considered as a means to support other goals (e.g. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, online learning) or an added value, sociability in the theory of Relational Aesthetics is per se an end to pursue. Based on an artist’s refection on the way we relate to others, a specific form of sociability is constructed to propose ‘to live in a shared world (ibid, p. 22)’. The production of sociability is a sort of experimentation of hands-on ‘micro-utopia’ of human relations. There is no ‘model’ or guidelines for sociability, but heterogeneous forms of sociability that represent the artist’s vision of inter-human relations are invented and experimented in an open-ended way. To explore and discuss the potential of the relational aesthetics approach for the design of interpersonal interactions in collaborative services, an ethnographic case study was carried out. The examined case ‘Scarsellini- vicini più vicini’ is a service design project that commenced in 2010 to foster collaborative ways of living among residents of an apartment block accommodating around one hundred apartments in Milan, Italy. Over three years, a series of design actions were carried out to facilitate interactions and collaboration among the residents who did not know each other nor live in the same neighborhood yet in the beginning of the project. The project was studied for 30 months (from 2011 to 2013) with a focus on the design activities intended to facilitate convivial relations between the residents, ranging from the creation of online social platform to social gatherings and meetings. Data gathered from in-depth unstructured interviews with the designer of the project, and non-intrusive observations on the (online and offline) interactions among participants were examined. Although it is not possible to define every human interaction either as a goal-oriented interaction or a fun-mode interaction, design actions of the Scarsellini project have attempted to direct interpersonal interactions to be fun. The online platform that was created to support communication and collaboration among participants was designed with social features like ‘conosciamoci (let’s get to know each other)’, ‘birthday of this week’. Even meetings to discuss particular issues (e.g. choosing a farmer from whom the residents buy vegetables collectively) or perform tasks (e.g. furnishing common spaces of the apartment block) were turned into occasions for sociable interactions (e.g. dinner prepared by the sample vegetables from different farmers, party for furniture assembly). The interest and participation of the residents have increased over three years. The number of residents who signed up for the online platform has increased from twelve (in April 2011, when the platform was introduced to the residents, and email invitation was sent to encourage to register) to 91 (in October 2012), and up to 141 (in June 2013) as some residents of the next-door apartment block joined. Besides a number of collaborative activities - ranging from babysitting exchange to collective purchasing - initiated by the residents, a distinctive outcome of this project was the sociability reproduced by the participants. In the beginning of the project, sociability was prompted solely by the effort of the designer, but gradually the residents became the actors of facilitating social interactions, and creating opportunities for convivial encounters. The intervention of the designer has been lessened throughout the project, but sociability has been produced in various ways (e.g. ranging from ‘movie night’ to ‘soccer game’) by the residents. The role of ‘facilitator’ that the designer used to play (e.g. posting friendly welcome messages to new members who introduce himself/herself on the ‘conosciamoci’ page of the website) also moved to the residents spontaneously. The Scarsellini project’s design approach to interpersonal interaction among participants was different from conventional approaches to service encounters. It was different from ‘scripting’ approach in the sense that non-scripted, spontaneous interactions were prompted. It is similar to the ‘meta-design’ approach (Cipolla, 2007) in the sense that the interpersonal relations were ‘meta-designed’ by creating conditions (e.g. online social platform, social drinks) that enable people to enter into interpersonal relations autonomously. Yet, unlike the meta-design approach, the encounters of Scarsellini project were not directed to deepen the relations over time. While the meta-design approach directs interpersonal encounters to evolve progressively (through three phases of acceptance, affirmation, and confirmation), design interventions of Scarsellini project were simply to prompt moments of sociability, and ‘arenas of exchange’. Lastly, the design approach of this project was far from ‘user-centered’ or participatory design approach as advocated in the contextual approach. Design interventions were driven by the vision of the designers, not based on the needs, goals, or contexts of the participants. Based on a critical review on existing approaches and an ethnographic case study, this research proposes a new approach to the design for interpersonal interactions in the production process of collaborative services. Moving from goal-oriented perspectives on service interactions, this dissertation argues to take sociability as the object of design for service interaction. Drawing upon the theory of Relational Aesthetics, it suggests an open-ended, experimental and vision-driven way of designing for sociability. The strength and value of this approach would lie in the fact that it addresses the issue of ‘pleasurability’ of services, which has not been well addressed in existing approaches, and also the aspects of ‘inter-human relations’ in contemporary society. Production of sociability is of value to make service experience more pleasurable, and more importantly to catalyze ‘meaningful bonds between individuals (Jégou & Manzini, 2008)’ and to ‘regenerate the social fabric (ibid.)’.

The growing importance of services in the business sector as well as public sector has spurred research and practices for service design. This dissertation aims to provide a new design approach for a specific type of services called ‘collaborative services’. Collaborative services, defined as services in which final users collaborate to produce solutions for a common need (Jégou & Manzini, 2008), have drawn attention as ‘a driver in the transition towards a more sustainable society’ (Ibid.) and ‘an engine for wider societal transformation’ (Sangiorgi, 2011). Compared to standard services, collaborative services are characterized by a high level of user participation, and the role of users as ‘co-designer’ or ‘partner’ in service production. The high level of commitment required to the participants can be a major limit to the diffusion of collaborative services (Manzini, 2011), thus it is necessary to make collaborative services more accessible, effective, and more attractive. This research puts a particular focus on the last point – how to make collaborative services more ‘attractive’. Making a service more ‘attractive’ can be interpreted in many different ways. It may include designing visible parts of a service more appealing: or developing service offering to provide more benefits to participants: or making user experience more enjoyable. This dissertation approaches this question in terms of ‘pleasurablity’. According to Clatworthy (2011), pleasurability - how pleasurable the interaction is at the emotional level - is one of the three basic elements to make services desirable. The other two elements are utility - what the service does, or offers the customer at the functional level, and usability - how easy it is to interact with the service. Service interactions include two types of interaction; human-service interface (touchpoints) interactions, and human-to-human interactions. Although both of them have an important role in user experience, the distinctive characteristics of collaborative services make the latter (human-to-human interactions) play a particularly crucial role in the user experience. There exist a number of approaches to design interpersonal service interactions, but this research argues that there is a need for a new design approach. Firstly, design approaches developed based on the standard service model (e.g. service scripting) are not well applicable to collaborative services, as interpersonal interactions in the production of collaborative services are different from those in standard services. Participants of collaborative services cannot be defined as neither ‘the server’ nor ‘the served’ as the outcomes are reciprocally produced and shared by the participants. Consequently, interactions among them tend to be symmetrical (Manzini, 2009). Previous studies especially in the service marketing literature tend to focus on the action of a service provider to provide good service experience from a unilateral perspective (e.g. politeness, friendliness of a service provider to a user), but collaborative services need to be designed to support many-to-many, open-ended interactions. Early studies in the field of service design paid attention mainly on collaborative services rooted in local communities (e.g. Cipolla, 2007; Meroni, 2007; Jégou & Manzini, 2008). In these cases, the services are performed between community members who have a sense of solidarity, and good relations with each other from daily life. The interpersonal relations among members provide a solid ground for the operations of collaborative services. However, nowadays a growing number of collaborative services are based on the Internet, which enables anyone connected to the Internet to collaborate beyond geographical and social boundaries. In these cases, collaborative services are performed between participants who do not have pre-existing relationship, and service encounters tend to be ephemeral. While design research based on the studies of the former type of collaborative services have provided design approaches emphasizing highly intensive relational qualities (e.g. Cipolla’s framework of relational construction process consisting of acceptance -affirmation - confirmation), there is little research about how to design interpersonal service interactions of the latter type of collaborative services, which often include interactions between strangers. More importantly, most of the existing design approaches tend to focus on task-based interactions. Such approaches are useful in understanding and designing goal-oriented interactions from a perspective of efficacy, but overlook ‘fun-based modes of behaviors (Meroni & Sangiorgi, 2011)’ driven by enjoyment and emotions. This dissertation assumes the latter plays a significant role in making service experience more pleasurable, thus need to be taken into account in the design of service interactions. This dissertation aims to propose an alternative design approach to interpersonal service interactions that are applicable to various types of collaborative services, with a focus on pleasurability. Existing approaches to interpersonal service interactions rely on various theoretical foundations, ranging from cognitive psychology to activity theory, but the topic ‘pleasurability’ is rarely explored as a central subject. To seek a potential theoretical foundation to explore human interaction from the perspective of pleasurability, this dissertation takes ‘aesthetic experience’ approaches in the Interaction Design field (e.g. Petersen, et al., 2004; Overbeeke et al., 2002; Ross & Wensveen, 2010, Wright et al., 2008) as a point of reference. As the aesthetics-oriented perspectives to Interaction Design have shifted the focus of Interaction Design from designing usable system - with an emphasis on ‘efficiency’ and ‘transparency’ – to designing aesthetic experience and ‘creating involvement, experience, surprise and serendipity in interaction’ (Petersen, et al., 2004) – with focuses on concepts like ‘pleasure’ (Jordan, 2000), ‘enjoyment’ (Blythe et al., 2003), ‘intrigue’ (Petersen, et al. 2004) and ‘fun’ (Blythe & Hassenzahl, 2003), this research hypothesizes that adopting an aesthetics-oriented perspective to Service Design discipline may contribute to understand and design service interactions from a perspective of pleasurable interactions. In particular, this research pays attention on ‘Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002)’ as the potential theoretical foundation for a service design approach. Relational Aesthetics advocates the value of ‘sociability’, and the opportunities of ‘ways of being together’ beyond commodified human relations that we are surrounded by in daily life. The sociability manifested in Relational Aesthetics shows some differences from the concept of sociability in the design literature (e.g. Preece, 2000; Foucault et al, 2007; Norman, 2008). While sociability in the design literature is often considered as a means to support other goals (e.g. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, online learning) or an added value, sociability in the theory of Relational Aesthetics is per se an end to pursue. Based on an artist’s refection on the way we relate to others, a specific form of sociability is constructed to propose ‘to live in a shared world (ibid, p. 22)’. The production of sociability is a sort of experimentation of hands-on ‘micro-utopia’ of human relations. There is no ‘model’ or guidelines for sociability, but heterogeneous forms of sociability that represent the artist’s vision of inter-human relations are invented and experimented in an open-ended way. To explore and discuss the potential of the relational aesthetics approach for the design of interpersonal interactions in collaborative services, an ethnographic case study was carried out. The examined case ‘Scarsellini- vicini più vicini’ is a service design project that commenced in 2010 to foster collaborative ways of living among residents of an apartment block accommodating around one hundred apartments in Milan, Italy. Over three years, a series of design actions were carried out to facilitate interactions and collaboration among the residents who did not know each other nor live in the same neighborhood yet in the beginning of the project. The project was studied for 30 months (from 2011 to 2013) with a focus on the design activities intended to facilitate convivial relations between the residents, ranging from the creation of online social platform to social gatherings and meetings. Data gathered from in-depth unstructured interviews with the designer of the project, and non-intrusive observations on the (online and offline) interactions among participants were examined. Although it is not possible to define every human interaction either as a goal-oriented interaction or a fun-mode interaction, design actions of the Scarsellini project have attempted to direct interpersonal interactions to be fun. The online platform that was created to support communication and collaboration among participants was designed with social features like ‘conosciamoci (let’s get to know each other)’, ‘birthday of this week’. Even meetings to discuss particular issues (e.g. choosing a farmer from whom the residents buy vegetables collectively) or perform tasks (e.g. furnishing common spaces of the apartment block) were turned into occasions for sociable interactions (e.g. dinner prepared by the sample vegetables from different farmers, party for furniture assembly). The interest and participation of the residents have increased over three years. The number of residents who signed up for the online platform has increased from twelve (in April 2011, when the platform was introduced to the residents, and email invitation was sent to encourage to register) to 91 (in October 2012), and up to 141 (in June 2013) as some residents of the next-door apartment block joined. Besides a number of collaborative activities - ranging from babysitting exchange to collective purchasing - initiated by the residents, a distinctive outcome of this project was the sociability reproduced by the participants. In the beginning of the project, sociability was prompted solely by the effort of the designer, but gradually the residents became the actors of facilitating social interactions, and creating opportunities for convivial encounters. The intervention of the designer has been lessened throughout the project, but sociability has been produced in various ways (e.g. ranging from ‘movie night’ to ‘soccer game’) by the residents. The role of ‘facilitator’ that the designer used to play (e.g. posting friendly welcome messages to new members who introduce himself/herself on the ‘conosciamoci’ page of the website) also moved to the residents spontaneously. The Scarsellini project’s design approach to interpersonal interaction among participants was different from conventional approaches to service encounters. It was different from ‘scripting’ approach in the sense that non-scripted, spontaneous interactions were prompted. It is similar to the ‘meta-design’ approach (Cipolla, 2007) in the sense that the interpersonal relations were ‘meta-designed’ by creating conditions (e.g. online social platform, social drinks) that enable people to enter into interpersonal relations autonomously. Yet, unlike the meta-design approach, the encounters of Scarsellini project were not directed to deepen the relations over time. While the meta-design approach directs interpersonal encounters to evolve progressively (through three phases of acceptance, affirmation, and confirmation), design interventions of Scarsellini project were simply to prompt moments of sociability, and ‘arenas of exchange’. Lastly, the design approach of this project was far from ‘user-centered’ or participatory design approach as advocated in the contextual approach. Design interventions were driven by the vision of the designers, not based on the needs, goals, or contexts of the participants. Based on a critical review on existing approaches and an ethnographic case study, this research proposes a new approach to the design for interpersonal interactions in the production process of collaborative services. Moving from goal-oriented perspectives on service interactions, this dissertation argues to take sociability as the object of design for service interaction. Drawing upon the theory of Relational Aesthetics, it suggests an open-ended, experimental and vision-driven way of designing for sociability. The strength and value of this approach would lie in the fact that it addresses the issue of ‘pleasurability’ of services, which has not been well addressed in existing approaches, and also the aspects of ‘inter-human relations’ in contemporary society. Production of sociability is of value to make service experience more pleasurable, and more importantly to catalyze ‘meaningful bonds between individuals (Jégou & Manzini, 2008)’ and to ‘regenerate the social fabric (ibid.)’.

Designing for sociability: a relational aesthetic approach to service encounter

CHO, EUN JI

Abstract

The growing importance of services in the business sector as well as public sector has spurred research and practices for service design. This dissertation aims to provide a new design approach for a specific type of services called ‘collaborative services’. Collaborative services, defined as services in which final users collaborate to produce solutions for a common need (Jégou & Manzini, 2008), have drawn attention as ‘a driver in the transition towards a more sustainable society’ (Ibid.) and ‘an engine for wider societal transformation’ (Sangiorgi, 2011). Compared to standard services, collaborative services are characterized by a high level of user participation, and the role of users as ‘co-designer’ or ‘partner’ in service production. The high level of commitment required to the participants can be a major limit to the diffusion of collaborative services (Manzini, 2011), thus it is necessary to make collaborative services more accessible, effective, and more attractive. This research puts a particular focus on the last point – how to make collaborative services more ‘attractive’. Making a service more ‘attractive’ can be interpreted in many different ways. It may include designing visible parts of a service more appealing: or developing service offering to provide more benefits to participants: or making user experience more enjoyable. This dissertation approaches this question in terms of ‘pleasurablity’. According to Clatworthy (2011), pleasurability - how pleasurable the interaction is at the emotional level - is one of the three basic elements to make services desirable. The other two elements are utility - what the service does, or offers the customer at the functional level, and usability - how easy it is to interact with the service. Service interactions include two types of interaction; human-service interface (touchpoints) interactions, and human-to-human interactions. Although both of them have an important role in user experience, the distinctive characteristics of collaborative services make the latter (human-to-human interactions) play a particularly crucial role in the user experience. There exist a number of approaches to design interpersonal service interactions, but this research argues that there is a need for a new design approach. Firstly, design approaches developed based on the standard service model (e.g. service scripting) are not well applicable to collaborative services, as interpersonal interactions in the production of collaborative services are different from those in standard services. Participants of collaborative services cannot be defined as neither ‘the server’ nor ‘the served’ as the outcomes are reciprocally produced and shared by the participants. Consequently, interactions among them tend to be symmetrical (Manzini, 2009). Previous studies especially in the service marketing literature tend to focus on the action of a service provider to provide good service experience from a unilateral perspective (e.g. politeness, friendliness of a service provider to a user), but collaborative services need to be designed to support many-to-many, open-ended interactions. Early studies in the field of service design paid attention mainly on collaborative services rooted in local communities (e.g. Cipolla, 2007; Meroni, 2007; Jégou & Manzini, 2008). In these cases, the services are performed between community members who have a sense of solidarity, and good relations with each other from daily life. The interpersonal relations among members provide a solid ground for the operations of collaborative services. However, nowadays a growing number of collaborative services are based on the Internet, which enables anyone connected to the Internet to collaborate beyond geographical and social boundaries. In these cases, collaborative services are performed between participants who do not have pre-existing relationship, and service encounters tend to be ephemeral. While design research based on the studies of the former type of collaborative services have provided design approaches emphasizing highly intensive relational qualities (e.g. Cipolla’s framework of relational construction process consisting of acceptance -affirmation - confirmation), there is little research about how to design interpersonal service interactions of the latter type of collaborative services, which often include interactions between strangers. More importantly, most of the existing design approaches tend to focus on task-based interactions. Such approaches are useful in understanding and designing goal-oriented interactions from a perspective of efficacy, but overlook ‘fun-based modes of behaviors (Meroni & Sangiorgi, 2011)’ driven by enjoyment and emotions. This dissertation assumes the latter plays a significant role in making service experience more pleasurable, thus need to be taken into account in the design of service interactions. This dissertation aims to propose an alternative design approach to interpersonal service interactions that are applicable to various types of collaborative services, with a focus on pleasurability. Existing approaches to interpersonal service interactions rely on various theoretical foundations, ranging from cognitive psychology to activity theory, but the topic ‘pleasurability’ is rarely explored as a central subject. To seek a potential theoretical foundation to explore human interaction from the perspective of pleasurability, this dissertation takes ‘aesthetic experience’ approaches in the Interaction Design field (e.g. Petersen, et al., 2004; Overbeeke et al., 2002; Ross & Wensveen, 2010, Wright et al., 2008) as a point of reference. As the aesthetics-oriented perspectives to Interaction Design have shifted the focus of Interaction Design from designing usable system - with an emphasis on ‘efficiency’ and ‘transparency’ – to designing aesthetic experience and ‘creating involvement, experience, surprise and serendipity in interaction’ (Petersen, et al., 2004) – with focuses on concepts like ‘pleasure’ (Jordan, 2000), ‘enjoyment’ (Blythe et al., 2003), ‘intrigue’ (Petersen, et al. 2004) and ‘fun’ (Blythe & Hassenzahl, 2003), this research hypothesizes that adopting an aesthetics-oriented perspective to Service Design discipline may contribute to understand and design service interactions from a perspective of pleasurable interactions. In particular, this research pays attention on ‘Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002)’ as the potential theoretical foundation for a service design approach. Relational Aesthetics advocates the value of ‘sociability’, and the opportunities of ‘ways of being together’ beyond commodified human relations that we are surrounded by in daily life. The sociability manifested in Relational Aesthetics shows some differences from the concept of sociability in the design literature (e.g. Preece, 2000; Foucault et al, 2007; Norman, 2008). While sociability in the design literature is often considered as a means to support other goals (e.g. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, online learning) or an added value, sociability in the theory of Relational Aesthetics is per se an end to pursue. Based on an artist’s refection on the way we relate to others, a specific form of sociability is constructed to propose ‘to live in a shared world (ibid, p. 22)’. The production of sociability is a sort of experimentation of hands-on ‘micro-utopia’ of human relations. There is no ‘model’ or guidelines for sociability, but heterogeneous forms of sociability that represent the artist’s vision of inter-human relations are invented and experimented in an open-ended way. To explore and discuss the potential of the relational aesthetics approach for the design of interpersonal interactions in collaborative services, an ethnographic case study was carried out. The examined case ‘Scarsellini- vicini più vicini’ is a service design project that commenced in 2010 to foster collaborative ways of living among residents of an apartment block accommodating around one hundred apartments in Milan, Italy. Over three years, a series of design actions were carried out to facilitate interactions and collaboration among the residents who did not know each other nor live in the same neighborhood yet in the beginning of the project. The project was studied for 30 months (from 2011 to 2013) with a focus on the design activities intended to facilitate convivial relations between the residents, ranging from the creation of online social platform to social gatherings and meetings. Data gathered from in-depth unstructured interviews with the designer of the project, and non-intrusive observations on the (online and offline) interactions among participants were examined. Although it is not possible to define every human interaction either as a goal-oriented interaction or a fun-mode interaction, design actions of the Scarsellini project have attempted to direct interpersonal interactions to be fun. The online platform that was created to support communication and collaboration among participants was designed with social features like ‘conosciamoci (let’s get to know each other)’, ‘birthday of this week’. Even meetings to discuss particular issues (e.g. choosing a farmer from whom the residents buy vegetables collectively) or perform tasks (e.g. furnishing common spaces of the apartment block) were turned into occasions for sociable interactions (e.g. dinner prepared by the sample vegetables from different farmers, party for furniture assembly). The interest and participation of the residents have increased over three years. The number of residents who signed up for the online platform has increased from twelve (in April 2011, when the platform was introduced to the residents, and email invitation was sent to encourage to register) to 91 (in October 2012), and up to 141 (in June 2013) as some residents of the next-door apartment block joined. Besides a number of collaborative activities - ranging from babysitting exchange to collective purchasing - initiated by the residents, a distinctive outcome of this project was the sociability reproduced by the participants. In the beginning of the project, sociability was prompted solely by the effort of the designer, but gradually the residents became the actors of facilitating social interactions, and creating opportunities for convivial encounters. The intervention of the designer has been lessened throughout the project, but sociability has been produced in various ways (e.g. ranging from ‘movie night’ to ‘soccer game’) by the residents. The role of ‘facilitator’ that the designer used to play (e.g. posting friendly welcome messages to new members who introduce himself/herself on the ‘conosciamoci’ page of the website) also moved to the residents spontaneously. The Scarsellini project’s design approach to interpersonal interaction among participants was different from conventional approaches to service encounters. It was different from ‘scripting’ approach in the sense that non-scripted, spontaneous interactions were prompted. It is similar to the ‘meta-design’ approach (Cipolla, 2007) in the sense that the interpersonal relations were ‘meta-designed’ by creating conditions (e.g. online social platform, social drinks) that enable people to enter into interpersonal relations autonomously. Yet, unlike the meta-design approach, the encounters of Scarsellini project were not directed to deepen the relations over time. While the meta-design approach directs interpersonal encounters to evolve progressively (through three phases of acceptance, affirmation, and confirmation), design interventions of Scarsellini project were simply to prompt moments of sociability, and ‘arenas of exchange’. Lastly, the design approach of this project was far from ‘user-centered’ or participatory design approach as advocated in the contextual approach. Design interventions were driven by the vision of the designers, not based on the needs, goals, or contexts of the participants. Based on a critical review on existing approaches and an ethnographic case study, this research proposes a new approach to the design for interpersonal interactions in the production process of collaborative services. Moving from goal-oriented perspectives on service interactions, this dissertation argues to take sociability as the object of design for service interaction. Drawing upon the theory of Relational Aesthetics, it suggests an open-ended, experimental and vision-driven way of designing for sociability. The strength and value of this approach would lie in the fact that it addresses the issue of ‘pleasurability’ of services, which has not been well addressed in existing approaches, and also the aspects of ‘inter-human relations’ in contemporary society. Production of sociability is of value to make service experience more pleasurable, and more importantly to catalyze ‘meaningful bonds between individuals (Jégou & Manzini, 2008)’ and to ‘regenerate the social fabric (ibid.)’.
TRABUCCO, FRANCESCO
MANZINI, EZIO
11-ott-2013
The growing importance of services in the business sector as well as public sector has spurred research and practices for service design. This dissertation aims to provide a new design approach for a specific type of services called ‘collaborative services’. Collaborative services, defined as services in which final users collaborate to produce solutions for a common need (Jégou & Manzini, 2008), have drawn attention as ‘a driver in the transition towards a more sustainable society’ (Ibid.) and ‘an engine for wider societal transformation’ (Sangiorgi, 2011). Compared to standard services, collaborative services are characterized by a high level of user participation, and the role of users as ‘co-designer’ or ‘partner’ in service production. The high level of commitment required to the participants can be a major limit to the diffusion of collaborative services (Manzini, 2011), thus it is necessary to make collaborative services more accessible, effective, and more attractive. This research puts a particular focus on the last point – how to make collaborative services more ‘attractive’. Making a service more ‘attractive’ can be interpreted in many different ways. It may include designing visible parts of a service more appealing: or developing service offering to provide more benefits to participants: or making user experience more enjoyable. This dissertation approaches this question in terms of ‘pleasurablity’. According to Clatworthy (2011), pleasurability - how pleasurable the interaction is at the emotional level - is one of the three basic elements to make services desirable. The other two elements are utility - what the service does, or offers the customer at the functional level, and usability - how easy it is to interact with the service. Service interactions include two types of interaction; human-service interface (touchpoints) interactions, and human-to-human interactions. Although both of them have an important role in user experience, the distinctive characteristics of collaborative services make the latter (human-to-human interactions) play a particularly crucial role in the user experience. There exist a number of approaches to design interpersonal service interactions, but this research argues that there is a need for a new design approach. Firstly, design approaches developed based on the standard service model (e.g. service scripting) are not well applicable to collaborative services, as interpersonal interactions in the production of collaborative services are different from those in standard services. Participants of collaborative services cannot be defined as neither ‘the server’ nor ‘the served’ as the outcomes are reciprocally produced and shared by the participants. Consequently, interactions among them tend to be symmetrical (Manzini, 2009). Previous studies especially in the service marketing literature tend to focus on the action of a service provider to provide good service experience from a unilateral perspective (e.g. politeness, friendliness of a service provider to a user), but collaborative services need to be designed to support many-to-many, open-ended interactions. Early studies in the field of service design paid attention mainly on collaborative services rooted in local communities (e.g. Cipolla, 2007; Meroni, 2007; Jégou & Manzini, 2008). In these cases, the services are performed between community members who have a sense of solidarity, and good relations with each other from daily life. The interpersonal relations among members provide a solid ground for the operations of collaborative services. However, nowadays a growing number of collaborative services are based on the Internet, which enables anyone connected to the Internet to collaborate beyond geographical and social boundaries. In these cases, collaborative services are performed between participants who do not have pre-existing relationship, and service encounters tend to be ephemeral. While design research based on the studies of the former type of collaborative services have provided design approaches emphasizing highly intensive relational qualities (e.g. Cipolla’s framework of relational construction process consisting of acceptance -affirmation - confirmation), there is little research about how to design interpersonal service interactions of the latter type of collaborative services, which often include interactions between strangers. More importantly, most of the existing design approaches tend to focus on task-based interactions. Such approaches are useful in understanding and designing goal-oriented interactions from a perspective of efficacy, but overlook ‘fun-based modes of behaviors (Meroni & Sangiorgi, 2011)’ driven by enjoyment and emotions. This dissertation assumes the latter plays a significant role in making service experience more pleasurable, thus need to be taken into account in the design of service interactions. This dissertation aims to propose an alternative design approach to interpersonal service interactions that are applicable to various types of collaborative services, with a focus on pleasurability. Existing approaches to interpersonal service interactions rely on various theoretical foundations, ranging from cognitive psychology to activity theory, but the topic ‘pleasurability’ is rarely explored as a central subject. To seek a potential theoretical foundation to explore human interaction from the perspective of pleasurability, this dissertation takes ‘aesthetic experience’ approaches in the Interaction Design field (e.g. Petersen, et al., 2004; Overbeeke et al., 2002; Ross & Wensveen, 2010, Wright et al., 2008) as a point of reference. As the aesthetics-oriented perspectives to Interaction Design have shifted the focus of Interaction Design from designing usable system - with an emphasis on ‘efficiency’ and ‘transparency’ – to designing aesthetic experience and ‘creating involvement, experience, surprise and serendipity in interaction’ (Petersen, et al., 2004) – with focuses on concepts like ‘pleasure’ (Jordan, 2000), ‘enjoyment’ (Blythe et al., 2003), ‘intrigue’ (Petersen, et al. 2004) and ‘fun’ (Blythe & Hassenzahl, 2003), this research hypothesizes that adopting an aesthetics-oriented perspective to Service Design discipline may contribute to understand and design service interactions from a perspective of pleasurable interactions. In particular, this research pays attention on ‘Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud, 2002)’ as the potential theoretical foundation for a service design approach. Relational Aesthetics advocates the value of ‘sociability’, and the opportunities of ‘ways of being together’ beyond commodified human relations that we are surrounded by in daily life. The sociability manifested in Relational Aesthetics shows some differences from the concept of sociability in the design literature (e.g. Preece, 2000; Foucault et al, 2007; Norman, 2008). While sociability in the design literature is often considered as a means to support other goals (e.g. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, online learning) or an added value, sociability in the theory of Relational Aesthetics is per se an end to pursue. Based on an artist’s refection on the way we relate to others, a specific form of sociability is constructed to propose ‘to live in a shared world (ibid, p. 22)’. The production of sociability is a sort of experimentation of hands-on ‘micro-utopia’ of human relations. There is no ‘model’ or guidelines for sociability, but heterogeneous forms of sociability that represent the artist’s vision of inter-human relations are invented and experimented in an open-ended way. To explore and discuss the potential of the relational aesthetics approach for the design of interpersonal interactions in collaborative services, an ethnographic case study was carried out. The examined case ‘Scarsellini- vicini più vicini’ is a service design project that commenced in 2010 to foster collaborative ways of living among residents of an apartment block accommodating around one hundred apartments in Milan, Italy. Over three years, a series of design actions were carried out to facilitate interactions and collaboration among the residents who did not know each other nor live in the same neighborhood yet in the beginning of the project. The project was studied for 30 months (from 2011 to 2013) with a focus on the design activities intended to facilitate convivial relations between the residents, ranging from the creation of online social platform to social gatherings and meetings. Data gathered from in-depth unstructured interviews with the designer of the project, and non-intrusive observations on the (online and offline) interactions among participants were examined. Although it is not possible to define every human interaction either as a goal-oriented interaction or a fun-mode interaction, design actions of the Scarsellini project have attempted to direct interpersonal interactions to be fun. The online platform that was created to support communication and collaboration among participants was designed with social features like ‘conosciamoci (let’s get to know each other)’, ‘birthday of this week’. Even meetings to discuss particular issues (e.g. choosing a farmer from whom the residents buy vegetables collectively) or perform tasks (e.g. furnishing common spaces of the apartment block) were turned into occasions for sociable interactions (e.g. dinner prepared by the sample vegetables from different farmers, party for furniture assembly). The interest and participation of the residents have increased over three years. The number of residents who signed up for the online platform has increased from twelve (in April 2011, when the platform was introduced to the residents, and email invitation was sent to encourage to register) to 91 (in October 2012), and up to 141 (in June 2013) as some residents of the next-door apartment block joined. Besides a number of collaborative activities - ranging from babysitting exchange to collective purchasing - initiated by the residents, a distinctive outcome of this project was the sociability reproduced by the participants. In the beginning of the project, sociability was prompted solely by the effort of the designer, but gradually the residents became the actors of facilitating social interactions, and creating opportunities for convivial encounters. The intervention of the designer has been lessened throughout the project, but sociability has been produced in various ways (e.g. ranging from ‘movie night’ to ‘soccer game’) by the residents. The role of ‘facilitator’ that the designer used to play (e.g. posting friendly welcome messages to new members who introduce himself/herself on the ‘conosciamoci’ page of the website) also moved to the residents spontaneously. The Scarsellini project’s design approach to interpersonal interaction among participants was different from conventional approaches to service encounters. It was different from ‘scripting’ approach in the sense that non-scripted, spontaneous interactions were prompted. It is similar to the ‘meta-design’ approach (Cipolla, 2007) in the sense that the interpersonal relations were ‘meta-designed’ by creating conditions (e.g. online social platform, social drinks) that enable people to enter into interpersonal relations autonomously. Yet, unlike the meta-design approach, the encounters of Scarsellini project were not directed to deepen the relations over time. While the meta-design approach directs interpersonal encounters to evolve progressively (through three phases of acceptance, affirmation, and confirmation), design interventions of Scarsellini project were simply to prompt moments of sociability, and ‘arenas of exchange’. Lastly, the design approach of this project was far from ‘user-centered’ or participatory design approach as advocated in the contextual approach. Design interventions were driven by the vision of the designers, not based on the needs, goals, or contexts of the participants. Based on a critical review on existing approaches and an ethnographic case study, this research proposes a new approach to the design for interpersonal interactions in the production process of collaborative services. Moving from goal-oriented perspectives on service interactions, this dissertation argues to take sociability as the object of design for service interaction. Drawing upon the theory of Relational Aesthetics, it suggests an open-ended, experimental and vision-driven way of designing for sociability. The strength and value of this approach would lie in the fact that it addresses the issue of ‘pleasurability’ of services, which has not been well addressed in existing approaches, and also the aspects of ‘inter-human relations’ in contemporary society. Production of sociability is of value to make service experience more pleasurable, and more importantly to catalyze ‘meaningful bonds between individuals (Jégou & Manzini, 2008)’ and to ‘regenerate the social fabric (ibid.)’.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10589/84261