Speaker

Lara Penin, Professor of Transdisciplinary Design, The New School, New York, USA.

About the talk

In this talk, Lara Penin will present The Bloomsbury Handbook of Service Design: Plural Perspectives and a Critical Contemporary Agenda, co-edited with Alison Prendiville and Daniela Sangiorgi – a five-year collective effort bringing together 70 contributors across 27 chapters to articulate a renewed agenda for service design in the 2020s. She will briefly reflect on the process of assembling the volume and its structure, which spans plural cosmologies, justice, participation, systems, uncertainty, and emerging practices, signaling a more reflexive and politically engaged direction for the field.

The talk will then focus on her co-authored chapter, “Worker-Centered Service Design: Countering the Invisibility of Workers”, which argues that designers are not only shaping user experiences but also the conditions of work itself. Connecting this work to the Scandinavian tradition of participatory and worker-centered design, she will explore how contemporary service design can renew alliances with labor in the age of platforms, automation, and precarity, sharing insights from her design-led research project The Workers Tarot.

 

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