Feminist service design: Experimenting with a diffractive approach to journey mapping

Developing scaling strategies for citizens’ assemblies requires situated knowledges. Local governments are increasingly using service design methods to foreground situated knowledges; however, the design research community calls for greater reflection on their application to enable ethical learning and transformation. In contrast to reflection, the feminist metaphor of diffraction enables greater relationality, complexity, and impact within research; yet it remains a novel approach. This paper presents an experiment conducted with participants of a city-level citizens’ assembly in Sweden. During the experiment, journey mapping was used within a diffraction apparatus, incorporating diffractive reading to enable the collective exploration of barriers to and opportunities for scaling citizens’ assemblies. A diffractive approach to journey mapping shifted the researcher’s position, increasing participants’ power. Furthermore, the resulting journey map visualised plurality and complexity. More research is recommended to explore the impacts of a research methodology that combines feminist onto-epistemologies, such as diffraction, with service design methods.