THE DESIGN OF WORK. A FRAMEWORK FOR DESIGNER WORKER SOLIDARITY

Lara’s presentation will make a case for establishing solidarity between designers and workers and propose a tentative framework/program of actions. Lara will start her talk by offering a brief review of service design established cannon to date, based on her book An Introduction to Service Design Designing the Invisible, and from there, she will focus on the critical issue of service labor and how design actions may have an impact on it, using a recent project study from Parsons DESIS Lab.

As we are by far and large situated in a service-based economy, there is a massive ongoing shift in the nature of work, particularly service work. While service jobs account for 80% of all jobs in the US, one third of them are gig workers. The gig economy is an emerging form of precarious work, joining other older forms of precarious work that are the norm in many countries worldwide. In addition, there are a number of other factors pressuring the nature of work today including automation, artificial intelligence, as well as persistent aspects of inequality related to class, race and gender issues.

Design has a lot to offer and a lot to respond to in relation to this issue. A multitude of apps, platforms and systems are being designed by a multitude of service and interaction/UX designers. Each feature they design will affect the user of the app but also the worker doing the invisible work hidden from the user view.

How do we capture new work identities as a tool for mobilization? How do we create new perceptions and imaginaries for the future of work departing from a true perception of service work today? How do we envision new features for digital workers’ safeguards? How do we rethink service design methods to ensure they are built on solidarity with service workers?

Bio:

Lara De Sousa Penin is an Associate Professor of Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design, where she has been director of the Transdisciplinary Design graduate program from 2015 to 2019 and a core faculty of the recently launched Graduate Minor in Civic Service Design. Lara is co-founder of the Parsons DESIS Lab, an action research laboratory that works at the intersection of service and strategic design, management, and social theory. Lara is the author of “An Introduction to Service Design. Designing the Invisible” (Bloomsbury, 2018).

She received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the São Paulo Architecture Biennale. Lara has a PhD in Design from the Milan Polytechnic University in Italy and a BA in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of São Paulo, in Brazil.

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