Towards Speculative Services for an Inclusive Society: Understanding the relationships between systemic-, service- and speculative design

Social exclusion needs to be studied from a comprehensive and exploratory perspective as a complex and systemic social problem, and there is an urgent need to promote social transformation towards an inclusive society. Over the past decade, Speculative Design has shown great potential as a critical approach to exploring the future and dealing with social issues. Also, there has been growing discussion about the approaches and applications of Service Design and Systemic Design to social issues and complex system problems. Complexity is a keyword in common for coping with social transformation and these three approaches. Further, to reach an inclusive society, designers have to face complex systems and wicked problems at different scales, from government, organizations, communities to final users, even including a non-human perspective. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to build a more comprehensive understanding of speculative design, service design, and systemic design themselves and the relationships between them by drawing together discussions from existing literature. This paper aims to support the startup of new research exploring whether integrating these three design approaches can support the systemic inclusive social transformation.