Systemic oppression is the enduring dehumanization of certain social groups, thereby maintaining their political, social, and economic disadvantage. Service design, most notably in digital labor platforms, has become entangled in the reproduction of oppression through capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial systems. Collaborating with the social movements that challenge these systems is a possible way forward for systemic service design. Still, self-criticism is needed to avoid reproducing oppression while trying to overcome it. With this aim, this chapter scrutinizes service design’s role in the cascading effect of systemic oppression, taking digital labor platforms as a paradigmatic example. By mapping the oppressive cascade from metadesigners to designers and from users to infrausers, this research identifies the crucial role played by the theater model in oppressive service design. To furnish an alternative model for systemic service design, we draw from Theatre of the Oppressed and Black intersectional feminism.

This chapter discusses how human bodies can be approached as materials for service design. Service design often involves human-to-human exchanges and the way humans use their bodies to mediate these exchanges can be designed and enacted as artifacts. Using a postphenomenological perspective, the chapter frames the human body as a key service interface, acknowledging that human bodies, like other forms of technology, can be designed as artifacts. The chapter also discusses how body schemata and body images, which are not necessarily co-extensive with the boundaries set by the human skin, can be extended and influenced through technology. The chapter concludes by emphasizing the importance of understanding and designing human bodies as a material in service design to create meaningful and effective service experiences