Van Amstel, Frederick M. C., Serpa, Bibibiana, Secomandi, Fernando. (2025). Systemic oppression in service design. In: Suoheimo, M., Jones, P., Lee, S., Sevaldson, B (Eds). Systemic service design. Routledge.
Abstract: Systemic oppression is the enduring dehumanization of certain social groups, thereby maintaining their political, social, and economic disadvantage. Service design, most notably in digital labor platforms, has become entangled in the reproduction of oppression through capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial systems. Collaborating with the social movements that challenge these systems is a possible way forward for systemic service design. Still, self-criticism is needed to avoid reproducing oppression while trying to overcome it. With this aim, this chapter scrutinizes service design’s role in the cascading effect of systemic oppression, taking digital labor platforms as a paradigmatic example. By mapping the oppressive cascade from metadesigners to designers and from users to infrausers, this research identifies the crucial role played by the theater model in oppressive service design. To furnish an alternative model for systemic service design, we draw from Theatre of the Oppressed and Black intersectional feminism.
