Participatory place-shaping: A case study in feminist pragmatist service design

This paper offers a vision for service design educators and practitioners informed by feminist pragmatist praxis. We argue that such a praxis can cultivate participatory place-based systemic change, presenting an empirically grounded model for infusing feminist pragmatist philosophy into service design practice. After summarizing the core commitments of feminist pragmatism, we analyse its potential through a service design case study. Findings indicate that feminist pragmatist practices can cultivate significant changes across social systems, including shifting mental models and geographic imaginaries of place, expanding relational networks across boundaries, creating and sustaining new programs, and shifting power by redistributing flows of resources and capacities. Based on study findings, the paper concludes by recommending a range of strategies found to be most useful for scaling systems change across multiple dimensions and in multiple directions (e.g. deep, relational, institutional, and cross-sectoral scaling.)