Meaningful Work Canvas: a visual tool for service designers

Abstract

While "empathy" is a usual reference in design discourses and methodologies on design, the main focus may be how designers can increase their sensibility to the demands of the clients or users on future service provisions. Nonetheless, the consideration of the voices and presence of workers constitute a pressing demand for service design theory and practices, still almost neglected in the field. This paper presents the Meanignful Work Canvas, a visual tool developed to help designers create from scratch services that facilitate providers to pursue work meaningfulness. It blends characteristics from Job Design and Job Crafting literature. The two first authors conducted workshops with a post-graduate class to codesign the tool with the students. The paper presents a service created by a student from this class, the third author, to illustrate how the Meaningful Work Canvas works. Besides creating worker-centric services, the tool was able to identify some patterns regarding how workers perceive their jobs and to educate the students at the workshop on what influences meaningful work. Meaningful Work Canvas represents an initiative to fill the gap in Service Design literature about creating services centred on workers.