Designing services for de-humanising futures

Keeping people in the processes, avoiding services that systematically reduce and substitute people with technology, avoiding transforming tasks into small automatable components, and avoiding making people the automated element of the system are the goals to be pursued in the future of service design. The major risk advanced technologies seem to introduce is to dramatically reduce the role and the agency of individuals and social groups either in making them the objects of decision making processes that negate their individuality, or by eliminating the possibility of questioning the decisions, or by putting them in an interaction where their range of choices is reduced to the minimum. The most important objective therefore to avoid the risks of dehumanisation is to keep human agency and design systems of collaboration rather than fully autonomous systems. In order to do so designers will have to mobilize multiple concurrent strategies that rely potentially on a new set of disciplines and alliances. Alongside the traditional participatory approaches we expect a far greater involvement with technologists and data scientists themselves in order to understand the type of partnerships between human and machine that can be envisaged (Zook et al. 2017). On the other hand as the legal and regulatory frameworks will become more stringent and more systematically embedded in the actual design of the systems (as we have seen in the ideas of privacy by design embedded in the GDPR regulations that we will discuss below), we expect service designers to be far more involved with these fields. Finally an engagement with political scientists will help develop a stronger understanding of the forms of risks and collaborations that can be developed between technology, public institutions and collective involvement.