Ocean and Service Design: Mutual Inspiration

The link between design and nature, day by day, is becoming tighter: on one hand, in terms of care and protection, on the other, as a model of formal and process inspiration. Considering the vastness of nature, it is necessary to focus on a more specific context: the ocean. In this paper, the ocean becomes the space to understand if there is a link between service design and nature. Considering that the discipline of service design uses many different tools to design, there is a tendency towards an ecological “mood” to redesign and design the tools. The aim of this article is not to establish new rules, but to demonstrate how the culture of the ocean can give suggestions to the instrumental framework of the service design discipline. The relationships between ocean and service are different: the ocean suggests, through predictability and feedback, ways to manage impact; service and ocean both need to “bring to the surface” submerged elements; the ocean shows how the partnership model can be extended by co-design processes.