Embodying, enacting and entangling design: a phenomenological view to co-designing services

What is holding back service design from making a distinct departure from a product-centred to a socio-material humancentred framework? We have a concern for co-designing that is often discussed as a generic method to develop empathetic connections and understandings of people and their contexts. In this use, mastering the craft of co-designing had inadvertently isolated the method from the practitioner, fragmenting its process as a series of static events or a tool for deployment in staged workshops. Contributing to current debates on co-designing and design anthropology, our paper seeks to re-entangle co-designing back into its lived and enacted contexts. We see co-designing as a reflexive, embodied process of discovery and actualisation, and it is an integral, on-going activity of designing services. Codesigning can catalyse a transformative process in revealing and unlocking tacit knowledge, moving people along on a journey to 'make real' what proposed services might be like in the future.