Protecting Personal Data in Surveillance Society: A Designerly Approach to Privacy in Service Design

Service design emerged in the last decades as the design practice that creates the conditions of interactions in the context of services. Contemporary business models involve interactions between users and the service and between end-users, where personal information is exchanged and processed. Hence, in a world labelable as ‘surveillance society’ or ‘surveillance capitalism’, the privacy and confidentiality of users’ information, image, and identity face serious threats. Building upon the human-centered design paradigm, service design is called to take an ethical stance to design services that do not jeopardize users’ privacy. First, however, service design should build its own comprehensive designerly understanding of privacy, based on input from other disciplines and on research, through design ethnography, to meaningfully tackle privacy challenges. Then, service designers should develop a designerly, project-based approach to protect informational privacy. Through tests and the solution to speculative and thought problems, service designers develop a service design thinking for privacy to design privacy-oriented services. We argue that a culture of designerly understanding of privacy shared across the service design community leads to a better service design.