Zijun Lin and Birger Sevaldson
Politechnico di Milano | The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), Norway
Nowadays, China’s food system faces significant challenges in the context of rapid urbanization, population growth, dietary transition and climate change. Current dietary patterns are threatening both human health and environmental sustainability. This paper takes the case study of the design project “Panacea Food Lab”, which illustrates an approach and practice of combining Service Design, Systems Oriented Design, and Co-creation to explore healthy diets and food system sustainability in a complex context. It aims to design interventions to facilitate the transition to healthy and sustainable diets in young Chinese consumers. The project provides a comprehensive service, including food innovation workshops and online services, by combining the offerings from the various stakeholders. This paper showcases the implementation of utilizing Systems Oriented Design methods to form a holistic understanding of a complex system and explore the potential systemic impact. The importance of long-term goals in a design project is also highlighted. Furthermore, combining systemic thinking with the Service Design and Co-creation approaches is significantly beneficial to proposing services and solutions for complex systems.
