Nicholas Sebastian Stevens, Ines Petra Junge, and Alma Leora Culén
Plurishops feature multiple inquiries simultaneously and support reflection, visioning, value surfacing, and integration towards a better understanding of some complex design space—in this workshop concerning sustainable product-service systems for everyday objects. Plurishops can be utilized as both research and design workshops (Dufva & Ahlqvist, 2015; Elsden et al., 2020; Irwin & Kossoff, 2017; Jones, 1992; Ørngreen & Levinsen, 2017). This plurishop (multi-strand workshop) focuses on three everyday products: smartphones, loudspeakers, and water kettles.
This plurishop is intended as an experience of participatory visioning (Gaziulusoy & Ryan, 2017) and reflections to re-imagine everyday digital products as more sustainable and a part of sustainable product-service systems. These re-imagined product-service systems should be desirable and answer needs that are not construed as a part of the consumerist paradigm. However, such imagination cannot rely solely on chance. Instead, it requires deliberate and comprehensive reflection, supported by design research knowledge, methods, skills, sense of ethics, social responsibility, and appropriate mindset and postures (Candy & Dunagan, 2017; Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022; Hopkins, 2019; Irwin, 2018; Scoblic, 2020) to arrive at a range of possible and desirable trajectories to pursue through design.
Plurishops are executed through collaborative efforts involving multiple teams, and we have structured ours using gameful thinking and participatory visioning. However, unlike games that have a clear goal, a plurishop focuses on the journey instead of a goal, a journey which is emergent, entangled, challenging, engaging and rewarding as an arena for critical reflections and multi-perspective thinking.
KEYWORDS: plurishop, product-service ecology, sustainability, complexity, reflection
