Guest Lecture Video: Cameron Tonkinwise

To kick off our Spring Lecture series for 2023, Products of Design was delighted to welcome Cameron Tonkinwise, who gives an annual lecture to our students and guests. This year's lecture is entitled "All Care, No Responsibility: Everything Service Designers Need to Know About Politics But Were Afraid to Ask."

Here’s the description; Cameron’s bio is below!

Service Design is one of the most recent formalizations of 'higher order designing,' that is, the application of design processes to things other than artifacts (communications, products, environments). Service Designing is often belittled as Design Thinking canvases on the one hand (the 'service blueprint') and a subset of UX Design on the other. This talk will outline how Service Designers are in fact engaged in designing the most fundamental aspects of human sociality: cooperation between strangers, senses of obligation, and the meaning of work. This suggests that Service Designers are dangerously under-educated, so the talk will outline what they need to learn from scholars of work like Kathi Weeks, and anthropologists of social value like the late, great Dave Graeber.

Enjoy the video below!

Professor Cameron Tonkinwise is an international expert in design studies and transition design. He writes and speaks extensively on the power of design to drive systems-level change to achieve more sustainable and equitable futures. Cameron has reshaped traditional thinking around how designers should be educated, and he has established Design Studies programs at the Parsons The New School for Design (New York), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and UTS. As part of his long-standing research and teaching around Sustainable Design, Cameron has emerged as a leading voice in the field of Transition Design, developed with colleagues at CMU – Terry Irwin and Gideon Kossoff. Cameron is currently teaching Service Design in the Master of Design degree program at UTS, and current research projects include efforts to help Australian banks transition toward more inclusive services and even act on behalf of vulnerable community members suffering financial abuse, and a project to help energy providers better understand how to design changes in everyday household life that will enable more sustainable distributed energy systems.