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Service Aesthetics

3 posts · February 2023 – March 2023

How do services structure sensory, conceptual, and contextual experience - and whose experience counts? A series drawing on Folkmann, Rancière, and phenomenology to develop an aesthetic vocabulary for service design.

  1. 1

    Aesthetics as a Design Problem

    February 20, 2023

    Before I became a service designer, I spent several years working as a ski instructor in Norway. The transition from teaching people to ski to designing public services might appear to be a...

  2. 2

    The Distribution of the Sensible in Service Design

    March 5, 2023

    The previous post argued that service design faces an aesthetic deficit: a lack of vocabulary and theoretical apparatus for discussing how services structure experience across sensual, conceptual,...

  3. 3

    Immateriality and the Sensual in Service Design

    March 20, 2023

    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,...

Reading Order

This series is designed to be read in order, with each post building on concepts from previous posts. Start with post 1 and work through sequentially, or jump to a specific section if you're familiar with the foundations.

Start reading: Aesthetics as a Design Problem

© Fergus Bisset 2026

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