ABSTRACT
This chapter presents four methodological tools with five co-design activities to expand service design’s frame of human centredness to embrace multi-species living systems. Reflecting on our fieldwork experiences in India in human and animal health systems, and the entangled nature of these assemblages of humans, animals, microbials and the environment we identified the need for co-design tools to go beyond the human-centred frame of Eurocentric design teaching. The first template focusses on accounting for ourselves, to understand how our own culture and background may bring biases and blind spots to local knowledge, systems and relationships. In the second template we reflect on the entanglement and proximity of humans and non-human species through a series of question relating to livelihoods, food systems, disease and risk. In template three attention is given to local customs and hierarchies and participants are asked to consider how design interventions may amplify and respect local values. Finally template four draws attention to the pluriverse and how this may be acknowledged through design practice, in design research and within a project. Finally, we conclude with a reflective exercise on the previous four activities to initiate a more situated service design framework for social design projects in the Global South.
