Despite the progress in recent decades, one in ten people globally still live in extreme poverty, and this number is set to increase in the coming years. Designing interventions to improve well-being and livelihoods is challenging because poverty is multidimensional and plays out in complex, adaptive social-ecological systems, where behaviours and practices at the local level can have unintended consequences elsewhere in the system. In such contexts, linear approaches to designing development interventions are insufficient. Service design has emerged as a human-centred, integrative approach to designing services and systems in complex settings, but knowledge gaps remain on how service design can be used to address development challenges in the Global South. Without an understanding of how service design tools and approaches function in these contexts, there is a risk they might inadvertently cause harm to research participants and local communities.

This thesis contributes new knowledge about how service design can be used to design development interventions in complex social-ecological contexts The research questions address three areas where service design could play a role: (i) how service design could be used to make sense of local level complexity and package this information for development programmers and policymakers; (ii) how service design could support local agency in the design of development projects; and (iii) how service design could be used to complement conventional methods of development research.

The research questions were addressed using three case studies of development interventions. In two of the cases, a clean cookstove intervention in Kenya and an insurance product for small-scale farmers in Uganda, a service design approach was combined with quantitative methods. In the third case study, participatory backcasting was used to inform a long-term plan for energy transition for an off-grid community in Machakos, Kenya. A conceptual framework was first developed to support the use of service design to address development challenges in complex social-ecological systems. Elements of the framework were then applied in two of the case studies: the cookstoves and insurance studies. The thesis uses service design as an approach and practice, and the capabilities approach as the main conceptual and theoretical framing.

The findings reveal that in these contexts, service design tools can become devices for understanding how value is assigned over time by users of the designed services. Archetype construction and prototyping became important devices for identifying patterns in heterogeneous needs and behaviours, while conveying key design parameters to policymakers and programmers. The research also shows that prototyping can enhance local agency by allowing research participants to challenge the core assumptions that underpin proposed interventions. The findings also demonstrate that participatory backcasting can be positioned as a device for prototyping future development pathways. It was found to facilitate individual and collective action in the short term. Combining service design devices with quantitative methods allowed triangulation of findings and a more comprehensive understanding of complex contexts.

Beyond the empirical findings on design devices, the thesis makes two important conceptual contributions. First, it positions service design as an integrative approach to conducting transdisciplinary development research in complex social-ecological contexts. Second, the thesis bridges service design and the capabilities approach and demonstrates how this can help designers anchor their work in the local context while navigating normative development objectives. The contributions are useful for service design researchers and practitioners interested in how service design can be used alongside other disciplines to support long-term development objectives. For the development community, the contributions demonstrate a radically different approach to designing interventions where complexity, messiness and non-linearity are embraced.

The interlinked global crises of poverty, inequality and climate change call for transformative solutions. Transformative change requires local agency and long-term planning, but this is not easily accommodated in development programmes, which often rely on short-term thinking and top-down technological solutions. Design methods have proved useful for facilitating co-development of technological solutions with marginalised communities. This case study explores whether—and, if so, how—participatory design can support grassroots transformational change by facilitating community engagement around the challenge of energy access. We used backcasting to facilitate the co-design of a 10-year transition roadmap to electric cooking with 30 members of a rural community in Kenya. The roadmap articulates a local vision of a long-term development process, including the community’s role in that process. Through follow-up interviews we found that workshop participation was linked to subsequent grassroots community actions. The findings are discussed in relation to the literature on transformation design.

Human behaviour change is necessary to meet targets set by the Paris Agreement to mitigate climate change. Restrictions and regulations put in place globally to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 during 2020 have had a substantial impact on everyday life, including many carbon-intensive behaviours such as transportation. Changes to transportation behaviour may reduce carbon emissions. Behaviour change theory can offer perspective on the drivers and influences of behaviour and shape recommendations for how policy-makers can capitalise on any observed behaviour changes that may mitigate climate change. For this commentary, we aimed to describe changes in data relating to transportation behaviours concerning working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic across the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. We display these identified changes in a concept map, suggesting links between the changes in behaviour and levels of carbon emissions. We consider these changes in relation to a comprehensive and easy to understand model of behaviour, the Opportunity, Motivation Behaviour (COM-B) model, to understand the capabilities, opportunities and behaviours related to the observed behaviour changes and potential policy to mitigate climate change. There is now an opportunity for policy-makers to increase the likelihood of maintaining pro-environmental behaviour changes by providing opportunities, improving capabilities and maintaining motivation for these behaviours.