Empathic Service Design: Challenges in design, analysis and services - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1350476390 ISBN 13: 9781350476394

Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts (UK), 2025

Synopsis

Through case studies from across the globe, this book helps designers understand how forward-looking service prototyping, analysis and tools can promote and create empathic, emotion-oriented and relevant services.

Despite services being at the core of organisations, to create service flows, designers, groups and their diverse stakeholders must negotiate ever more complex and hybrid interactions between human and more-than-human role players in service delivery. The challenge lies in delivering empathic, relevant and desirable services, despite these complexities. New knowledge is needed to bridge the gaps, uncertainties and even anxieties that organisations face in making their service delivery empathic and keeping them purposeful to users.

Addressing problems within service delivery like empathy fatigue, poor collaboration, and siloed work experiences that lead to poorly-functioning systems, the authors suggest concrete solutions for developing empathetic approaches and tools with consideration for the needs of participants. The book critically examines the role of empathy, and explores how compassionate understanding of the end-user is key to success.

Case studies include mapping of children's services, wearable technologies for pandemics, understanding cultural sensitivity, emojis and chat bots, and AI used in care settings.

About this title

About the Authors

Dr Melanie Sarantou is Professor of Social Design at Kyushu University in Japan. Her interests span the role of improvisation in arts and design practices when the unsuspected emerges and surprises the researcher. She seeks to understand how the haptic and tactile qualities of arts and narrative practices can sustain marginalised communities. Her recent research explored the role of the arts in mitigating societal challenges.

Dr Satu Miettinen is Professor of Service Design at the University of Lapland, Finland, with research interests spanning the themes of design methods in engaging with the Arctic region, service design methods for inclusion, the participatory development of services and socially responsible art and design methods. Satu is also Dean of the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Lapland.

Dr Titta Jylkäs is a service designer focusing on digital services with artificial intelligence and data science. She works as an independent design consultant and as a senior lecturer at the University of Lapland. Previously, she has had roles in large corporations as an in-house designer, as a consultant for a design agency, as a service designer in the public sector and as a senior researcher in academia. Her current interests are in intelligent services and the impact that service design can have on the ethics of artificial intelligence.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts (UK)
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350476390
• ISBN 13: 9781350476394
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 376
• Editor: Melanie Sarantou, Satu Miettinen, Titta Jylkäs