Collective Embodiment in Service Interfaces

This chapter explores the relations between oppressed and oppressor bodies in service design through Theatre of the Oppressed, a dramaturgical approach that harnesses contradictions of body. 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.