The social landscape of Service Design. Exploring the entanglements of the Service Design community on Twitter through social network analysis

Abstract

Service Design is not only a discipline, a profession, and a field of research but also a community of actors (professionals, researchers, organizations, institutions) working on service design practice and research, locally rooted but often globally connected. With Service Design we design the intangible, the behaviors, and the flows among actors, but still, we rarely look at how these also are part of Service Design. How are the actors of the Service Design community entangled among each other? In our study, we focused on Twitter as a proxy environment for analyzing the connections between Service Design actors, adopting Social Network Analysis and networks as the perspective for understanding complexity and complex systems. In this article, we explore the Service Design actors on Twitter in terms of communities identified, general statistics, centrality measurements, the evolution over time and the geographical location of actors.