Plurality and Cultural Specificity of Service Design in East and Southeast Asia (Design Research Foundations)

This open-access book expounds on how service design has been adopted and practiced in Asia, and how it has impacted especially the East and Southeast Asian countries. As service design is a socio-technical practice that is co-produced in context, the contributors focus on how service design has been applied and how it has evolved heterogeneously by interacting with the cultural and social dimensions of Asian countries.

As the application domains of service design vary, this book covers adoptions and practices in different areas: Asian governments, the civic and grassroots sectors, and business transformation. The contextual framing of the chapters is ultimately synthesized and analyzed in the concluding Discussion chapter of the book. This chapter takes into consideration the history and objects of service design, the interactions between research and practice, methodologies, and comparisons to practices in the Western World. This book appeals to students, researchers, and professionals in the field.

Jung-Joo Lee is an Associate Professor and Deputy Head of Research in the Division of Industrial Design at the National University of Singapore. She also serves as the Director of the Service Design Lab Singapore. Her research focuses on leveraging service design for innovation in both the public sector and care economies, particularly utilizing emerging technologies.

Joon Sang Baek a Professor in the Department of Integrated Design and the director of DESIS (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) Lab at Yonsei University in South Korea. His research area lies in the nexus of service/systems design, sustainability and social innovation. He is currently interested in complex sociotechnical systems design, relational service design, post-humanist design, human-nature connection, and human-nature interaction design.

Eun Yu is an Assistant Professor in the department of visual communication design at Seoul National University of Science and Technology. Her research has focused on theorizing the designerly service design approach from the multidisciplinary perspective and theory, especially related to service marketing and management, and she is currently interested in how to operationalize service (eco)systems theory in designers’ systemic design practices.