Making sense of Data through Service Design : opportunities and reflections

As our daily activities are increasingly facilitated by digital services, including social interactions, shopping, work practices, banking, healthcare and transportation information, the concept of ‘big data’ and the potential opportunities therein are beginning to permeate and shape social, economic and political arenas at local, national and international levels. Consequently there is much attention given to extending the pervasive collection of data through our ever-growing service interactions. Whether through aggregating data for governments and commercial organisations to aid decision-making or for drilling down to create profiles of individuals, large-scale data sets (LSDS) are now core to service delivery, development and innovation. With expanding possibilities of data gathering there is also increasing concern, not just over personal information, surveillance and online security but also how this information and behavioural data is stored. As a field of study Service Design needs to rethink its role within service innovation to become more engaged in the interdisciplinary boundaries of social and computational science, to limit the abstraction of the human, by designing services that make explicit issues of data use, privacy and trust. This chapter addresses the opportunities for service designers to act as an agent between data holders and end-user communities, offering and facilitating translation and customisation solutions from data, and to consider how exposure to big data might Influence and instigate behavioural and attitudinal change within individuals and service users. The authors will focus on the challenges faced by Service Designers as they move into a space that is highly abductive and quantifiable whilst aiming to maintain and implement a critical human centredness perspective.