tools and m p ro eth f iol d es
Lara Penin Meet the service designer
For this issue of Touchpoint, Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes met with service design pioneer and educator Lara Penin, who has recently made a great contribution to the service design literature, with her publication of An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible.
Jesse Grimes: You've been educated at one of the first universities world-wide offer to service design coursework Politecnico di Milano - and now you are leading the Transdisciplinary Design Graduate Program at Parsons School of Design in New York City and teaching service design. From your perspective within academia, what are some of the differences (and commonalities) between service design education in Europe and North America?
Lara Penin: My personal experience covers a few institutions in Europe, North and South America and academic relationships developed in many other countries. So my account is less of a regional comparative analysis of service design education and more of a reflection on its progress in the last 15 years. When I was a PhD student in Politecnico di Milano back in the early 2000s, service design was emerging as new paradigm for thinking differently
about design, but it wasn’t clear what were the industries and applications that could benefit from it the most. Literature was scarce, because pioneer practitioners were still working on the first de-facto demo projects for service design and there hadn’t been enough time to reflect on these projects, verify their impact and codify learnings into teaching resources. The first service design firms were emerging and some European funded multi-institution projects started gathering both academia and industry partners around issues such as food systems and other themes that were ripe for innovative approaches. Together, these players helped define a first wave of tools and approaches and started formulating the potential transformative capacity of service design. All very aspirational and experimental. In the circles in which I participated there was a shared interest in services as a potential strategy to reduce the environmental impact of goods, with
Lara Penin is an Associate Professor, Director of Transdisciplinary Design Graduate Program at Parsons, co-founder of Parsons DESIS Lab and author of An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible. PeninL@newschool.edu
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