Stefan Blachfellner, Managing Director of the BCSSS, was invited by BCSSS Member and designaustria Board Member Martin Fössleitner to join the designaustria strategy workshop as participating innovation expert in January 2019, as a follow up of the designaustria 90th anniversary collaboration.

Designaustria hosts a vast network of organisations and individuals making it Austria’s first address for design. The workshop showed yet again the good and fruitful relationship between the BCSSS and designaustria. One contribution Stefan made was the observation of the emergence of several new occupational fields in design. From a systems perspective we want to give special attention to the emergence of two new professional fields.

Service Design.

The Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) of the OECD has recently defined service design as “understanding and re-configuring people, infrastructure, and resources involved in delivering a service for the purpose of improving the service experience—with the public, internal and external service users, internal operators, or others”. The fact that the OECD-OPSI is defining these activities shows the importance of it also on an international scale. They also state very clear, that a basic principle of service design is that services should be designed with a system lens rather than as piecemeal components and that service design processes deal with complex systems by its nature.

Design for Science.

Another new professional design field deals with design for science and here particularly with visualisation of data for decision processes in the context of human and software interaction. Interface design as well as data visualisation for decisions has so far more been a business concern and thus domain. But now that systems science approaches are also in demand again in political and economic decision-making processes, complex data based evidence needs to be accessible for scientists as well as non-scientists. Thus, Design becomes essential in science communication.

The BCSSS is thankful and very excited about the invitation to think and co-create along with designaustria regarding these new emerging fields. Design for Science promises an innovative mutual relationship for both domains. We are very happy to pick up the strings of the so far established relationship of science and design and create future oriented collaborations together with designaustria.