The two preceding posts in this series have established a framework for thinking about aesthetics in service design: Folkmann's (2013) three platforms - sensual-phenomenal, conceptual-hermeneutical, contextual-discursive - provide a structure for decomposing how design shapes experience, while Rancière's (2013) conception of aesthetics as the distribution of the sensible provides the political dimension, insisting that what is made perceptible is never a neutral act. This final post turns to what might appear to be a paradox: as design practice has become more immaterial - concerned with services, systems, experiences, and policies rather than with physical products - the sensual and embodied dimensions of what is being designed have become simultaneously more important and harder to articulate.
The immaterial turn
The shift toward immateriality in design practice is well documented. Buchanan's (1992) four orders of design - from graphic symbols through products and activities to complex systems - trace an arc from the material toward the increasingly immaterial. Krippendorff's (2005) trajectory of artificiality moves from products through interfaces and networks to discourses, each stage more abstracted from physical form than the last. Folkmann (2016) speaks directly of "immaterially operating design" to describe practices such as service design, interaction design, and experience design that work with the structuring of experience rather than the shaping of matter. Blomberg and Darrah (2015) describe the broader shift toward services as a reorientation of economic and social organisation around relationships, processes, and value co-creation rather than around the production and exchange of goods.
None of this is news; the discourse on servitisation and the transition from goods to services has been extensively rehearsed. What has received less attention is the specific aesthetic challenge this transition creates. When design works with physical materials - wood, metal, fabric, pixels on a screen - the sensual dimension of the work is, in a sense, given. The designer handles the material, perceives its qualities, develops an embodied feel for what it can and cannot do. The aesthetic judgement involved in deciding that this curve is right or that joint is too heavy is a form of trained perception that engages the senses directly. The feedback is immediate: you can see, touch, and respond to the material as it takes shape.
When design works with immaterial phenomena - service encounters, organisational processes, policy frameworks, digital interactions distributed across time and space - this sensory directness is lost. The service designer does not touch the service; they represent it, model it, discuss it, prototype aspects of it, but the service itself, as experienced by users, is not an object that can be handled. The aesthetic judgement that might inform the design of a physical object - the feeling that something is not quite right, the perception that a proportion is off, the sense that a surface quality needs adjustment - must operate through representation and imagination rather than through direct sensory engagement with the material being shaped.
The corporeal turn
Against this background of increasing immateriality in design practice, research in human-computer interaction and design has moved in what appears to be the opposite direction, toward a renewed emphasis on the body. Sheets-Johnstone (2009) identifies a broader "corporeal turn" across the human sciences, a reorientation of attention toward embodied experience, bodily movement, and the role of the sensing body in constituting knowledge. Within design research specifically, this turn has produced several related but distinct programmes of inquiry.
Shusterman's (2008; 2012) philosophical project of "somaesthetics" argues for the cultivation of heightened bodily awareness as a foundation for improved experience and judgement. Somaesthetics, as Shusterman defines it, is the critical study of one's experience and use of one's body as a site of sensory-aesthetic appreciation and creative self-fashioning. The argument is not that bodily awareness is a nice supplement to intellectual engagement but that it is a foundational form of knowing - that the body's perceptual capacities, when cultivated and attended to, provide forms of understanding that propositional knowledge alone cannot supply.
Höök (2018) translates this philosophical programme into design practice through what she calls "somaesthetic interaction design". Höök's argument is that design methods have been overwhelmingly cognitive - focused on what users think, want, need, and understand - while neglecting the embodied, sensory, affective dimensions of interaction. Somaesthetic interaction design proposes methods that engage the designer's own body as a design instrument: practices of slow, attentive movement, breathing exercises, body scans, and other techniques borrowed from somatic traditions that cultivate awareness of bodily sensation as a resource for design judgement. The premise is that designers who are more aware of their own bodily experience will design interactions that are more sensitive to the bodily experience of users.
The broader context for this work is what the HCI research community has termed the "third wave" of human-computer interaction research: a move beyond the cognitive and task-oriented concerns of earlier HCI toward questions of experience, emotion, embodiment, and meaning-making (Bødker, 2006). This third wave recognises that as digital technologies become more pervasive, more intimate, and more deeply integrated into everyday life, the quality of the bodily and emotional experience they produce matters at least as much as their functional performance. The literature on affect and its transmission in socio-technical contexts (Röttger-Rössler and Slaby, 2018; Ahmed, 2014) extends this further, examining how designed environments and interactions shape not merely individual sensory experience but the affective atmospheres and emotional registers within which experience occurs.
The paradox for service design
The paradox, then, is this: service design is a form of immaterially operating design that shapes experiences with significant sensual, embodied, and affective dimensions, but it lacks the methods and vocabularies that would allow it to engage with these dimensions directly. The corporeal turn in HCI and design research has produced rich theoretical and methodological resources for attending to embodied experience, but these resources have been developed primarily in the context of interaction design - the design of interfaces, devices, and digital interactions - rather than in the context of service design, where the "interface" is often a complex, temporally extended encounter between people within an institutionally mediated context.
My professional experience underscores this gap from both sides. As a ski instructor, the embodied dimension of the work was primary: you taught through the body, perceived through the body, adjusted your approach on the basis of what you could sense about the student's physical relationship with the terrain. The aesthetic quality of a well-taught skiing session was palpable - there was a rhythm to it, a quality of attention, a progressive refinement of sensation that both instructor and student could feel even if neither could fully articulate it. This embodied aesthetic knowledge was the core professional capability; everything else - pedagogical theory, technical analysis, communication skills - was in service of it.
In service design practice, by contrast, the embodied dimension of the services being designed is almost entirely mediated through documentation and discussion. The healthcare service user's experience of receiving a diagnosis, the frustration of navigating an automated telephone system, the anxiety of waiting for a benefits decision - these are experiences with overwhelming sensual and affective dimensions, but they enter the design process as data points, interview transcripts, and journey map annotations.
The bodily reality of the experience - what it feels like to be in that waiting room, to hear that diagnosis, to try to parse that letter - is translated into representational forms that strip out much of what made it an experience in the first place. This is not unique to service design; as Visser (2009) documents, the challenge of bringing everyday lived experience into design is a persistent methodological problem across design research. But the temporal and institutional distribution of service encounters makes the problem particularly acute.
This is not a critique of service design methods so much as a recognition of their limits. Journey maps, blueprints, and personas are powerful tools for making complex service systems visible and discussable; they enable forms of analysis and collaboration that would otherwise be impossible. But they are tools developed for conceptual and contextual work - for understanding how services are structured, how processes flow, how different actors interact - and they are considerably less effective at representing the sensual, embodied, affective qualities of service encounters. The result is that service design, as currently practiced, tends to be stronger on the conceptual-hermeneutical and contextual-discursive platforms of Folkmann's (2013) framework than on the sensual-phenomenal platform.
Toward a more complete aesthetics of service
Addressing this gap is not straightforward. One cannot simply import somaesthetic methods from interaction design into service design practice, because the design objects are different: interaction design shapes discrete, bounded interactions between a person and a device, whereas service design shapes extended, distributed encounters between people within institutional contexts. The unit of analysis is different; the temporal scale is different; the role of institutional mediation is different. What can transfer is the underlying sensibility: the recognition that embodied experience matters, that the body is a site of knowing, and that design methods which neglect the sensory-phenomenal dimension of experience are working with an incomplete account of what they are trying to shape.
The emerging body of work exploring design as a social process (Tonkinwise, 2019), services as co-produced between providers and consumers (Akama, 2015; Blomberg and Darrah, 2015; Vink and Koskela-Huotari, 2021), and the increasingly intimate relationship between bodies and digital interfaces (McCullough, 2013) all point toward the need for service design to develop a more articulate engagement with embodied, sensual, and affective experience. What this might look like in practice - what methods, what vocabularies, what forms of attention - is a question I intend to return to as this blog develops.
For now, the argument across these three posts can be summarised as follows. Service design faces an aesthetic deficit that is structural rather than incidental: the practice shapes experience across sensual, conceptual, and contextual registers, but its methods and vocabularies are unevenly developed across these registers. Folkmann's (2013) three-platform model provides a framework for articulating this unevenness. Rancière's (2013) conception of aesthetics as the distribution of the sensible provides the political dimension, insisting that the aesthetic choices embedded in service design are simultaneously political choices about whose experience is recognised. And the corporeal turn in design research - particularly the work on somaesthetics (Shusterman, 2008; 2012; Höök, 2018) and affect (Ahmed, 2014; Röttger-Rössler and Slaby, 2018) - provides resources for beginning to address the sensual-phenomenal gap, even as the immaterial nature of service design makes direct application of these resources a non-trivial challenge.
These are interests I expect to carry forward across a range of contexts - from the tourism and hospitality settings where I first encountered them, through the public sector digital services I now work with, to the broader questions about design capability, judgement, and method that animate this research blog.
References
Ahmed, S. (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press.
Akama, Y. (2015). Continuous re-configuring of invisible social structures. In E. A. Bruni, L. L. Parolin, and C. Schubert (Eds.), Designing technology, work, organizations and vice versa (pp. 163-183). Vernon Press.
Blomberg, J. and Darrah, C. (2015). An Anthropology of Services. Morgan and Claypool Publishers.
Bødker, S. (2006). When Second Wave HCI Meets Third Wave Challenges. In Proceedings of the 4th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 1-8). ACM.
Buchanan, R. (1992). Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. Design Issues, 8(2), 5-21.
Folkmann, M. N. (2013). The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design. MIT Press.
Folkmann, M. N. (2016). The Role of Aesthetics for Design Phenomenology: The Sensual, Conceptual, and Contextual Framing of Experience by Design. Proceedings of the 11th EAD Conference. Sheffield Hallam University.
Höök, K. (2018). Designing with the Body: Somaesthetic Interaction Design. MIT Press.
Krippendorff, K. (2005). The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design. Taylor and Francis.
McCullough, M. (2013). Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. MIT Press.
Rancière, J. (2013). The Politics of Aesthetics. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Röttger-Rössler, B. and Slaby, J. (2018). Affect in Relation: Families, Places, Technologies. Routledge.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2009). The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Imprint Academic.
Shusterman, R. (2008). Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics. Cambridge University Press.
Shusterman, R. (2012). Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics. Cambridge University Press.
Tonkinwise, C. (2019). Is social design a thing? In E. Resnick (Ed.), The Social Design Reader (pp. 9-16). Bloomsbury.
Vink, J. and Koskela-Huotari, K. (2021). Social Structures as Service Design Materials. International Journal of Design, 15(3).
Visser, F. S. (2009). Bringing the Everyday Life of People Into Design. PhD thesis, TU Delft.