Conference article

Services are the largest contributor to the Philippines’ economy, prompting the necessity of exploring what service design might contribute to the country. This paper seeks to explore what service design means in a country like the Philippines, where business interests, customer demands, and working conditions of service staff rarely intersect as a result of imbalanced power dynamics. It presents practice notes detailing the tensions between desirability as a function of satisfying user wants and needs and as a function of largescale societal impact, and proposes a way forward through designing with compassion.

the philippines, humane design, compassion in service design, customers and service staff tensions, power dynamics