Design performativity in cultural service for creating social impact

In the increasingly complex social context, service design shows its advantage in dealing with wicked problems and provoking social innovation through systematic thinking and public participation. Besides the innovation in the dimension of problem-solving, service design has the potential to play an essential role in creating social impact to lead a larger scale of social change. If we regard cultural service design as a sense-making activity, performativity is important in trying to magnify the sensitivity of visitors’ experience. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach to transfer the knowledge from performance studies to enhance the ability of cultural service in sense-making and impact-creating. This paper conducts a preliminary review in order to understand service design as a sense-making activity, whilst exploring the potential of performativity in achieving social impact. After structure analogy and case analysis, an initial meta-design framework is proposed, enlightening a set of critical stages and elements in potential applied projects.