van Amstel, Frederick M. C. , and Fernando Secomandi. (2025) Collective Embodiment in Service Interfaces. In Penin, L. de S., Prendiville, A. and Sangiorgi, D. (Eds), Bloomsbury Handbook of Service Design: Plural perspectives and a critical contemporary agenda, 305–316. London New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2025.
In a service interface, people do not merely act as individuals. They act (and are acted upon) as collective bodies. Race, gender, and class relations define the structural elements of these collective bodies: what they are and what they can or cannot do. Service design typically does not bring these relations to the fore, even when they are manifest in service interfaces so clearly, as in the gendered division between backstage and frontstage. In part, this is due to the oppressive theater metaphor that separates backstage from frontstage at the service interface. Shifting to Theater of the Oppressed enables a completely different interface design, briefly described in this chapter. In a workshop setting, designers enacted a service interface of a ride-hailing app introducing a new silent-ride feature that discourages drivers talking to customers. The analysis of this workshop revealed the contradiction of capitalising human bodies as an extension of a digital service interface. This chapter concludes that, by taking a dialectical-existential perspective over the body, service design can contribute to rehumanising historically oppressed bodies in the design of service interfaces.
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