This article proposes a framework for service storytelling by analyzing its key elements with Aristotle's Poetics and synthesizing them using the temporal structure of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey. Poetics refer to the art of making that is concerned with the general pattern of human experience. We use this framework to study the four causes of storytelling: material cause, efficient cause, formal cause, and end cause. The Hero's Journey is a cyclical model that encompasses both an ordinary and a special world. We utilize this model to synthesize the four causes into a phasic flow, including deficiency, growth, personalization, and transformation.

This article explores the nature of conceptual models for designing service participation. Conceptual models are both a representation and a hypothesis, dialectically creating conditions of participation. I first study the nature of a conceptual model and then explore the four arts with focus on the notion of form. Each art reveals a mode of thought regarding the form of the participatory whole: grammatical model of coproduction, rhetorical model of argumentation, poetic model of experience, and dialectic model of commitment. Along with the arts, I present case studies of four distinctive conceptual models that have been used to design for participation.

After decades of delay, the U.S. legal profession is finally embracing digital technology in the delivery of civil justice. Much more rapidly, design methods are being embraced by legal institutions as a means reforming everything from commercial legal product lines to civil court forms. What explains the rapid embrace of legal design when digital legal technology took decades to break through? We think that a deliberately human-centered approach to law helps explain the sudden advantageousness of legal design. But what must be done about the bias and inequity that is embedded within the legal systems we seek to redesign, and within the legal design movement itself? We propose that a radical iterative and collaborative effort that is deliberately structured to address systemic bias has the strongest potential to deliver on the promise of both design and justice.

This paper explores a conceptual framework for deepening our understanding of the social and ethical aspects of service, such as human dignity. A philosophical survey of this topic reveals that the basis of dignity is autonomy; however, current frameworks of service, which are often based on the logics of mass production and information control, generally attempt to control people rather than supporting their autonomous actions. As an alternative, I propose a framework of service based on the concept of participation, defined as the collective action of parts related to the whole for the purpose of achieving a shared goal.

Design academia and industry has increasingly recognized service as a perspective of design. However, there is still more to explore in design research regarding the assumption that sits beneath this success: What is service? In this paper I explore this question by collecting different perspectives on service that have existed throughout human history: objectified labor, mutual aid, communal sharing, and assistance by contract. By exploring these diverse historical understandings of service, I seek to draw attention to the nature of service as participation.