Transformative Services and Transformation Design

The fact that transformation design is aiming at radical change is also emphasized. They suggest that transformation design can be applied to radically change public and community services, working for socially progressive ends, or can, alternatively, trigger change in a private company introducing a human-centred design culture. Furthermore, service design has recently been considering services less as design objects and more as means for societal transformation. The intrinsic element of co-production of services in transformation design necessitates the concomitant development of staff, the public and the organisation. This is particularly evident in the debate around the reform of public services where both organisations and citizens are asked to evolve and adapt to more collaborative service models, thereby changing their roles and interaction patterns (Parker & Parker, 2007). In this way, service design is entering the fields of organisational development and social change, with little background knowledge of their respective theories and principles. In this light, the questions which arise are: How can designers working with communities affect and transform organisations or, vice versa, how can designers working within organisations affect and positively transform user communities? It is also necessary to clarify the form of transformations, why these are desirable and who will particularly benefit from them. This article aims at providing a first framework for transformation design, in the specific context of public services reform, by suggesting the adoption of key concepts and principles derived from research fields that have focused for decades on the issues of transformational change within organisations and communities, such as organisational development and community action research. Participatory action research has been chosen in particular as a possible integrating methodological framework that characterises both research fields of organisational development