Building the empowered community towards a service design perspective: Case study of West Central District in Tainan

Abstract

This research aims to explore the building of community empowerment towards service design perspective. Community empowerment is the process by which local residents increase their assets and attributes and build capacities to gain access, partners, and networks, in order to gain control. Therefore, many recent works already take community empowerment as a process of enabling communities to increase control over their lives with a five-dimension framework including confident, inclusive, organized, co-operative and influential. However, there is still a lack of discussion about how to develop these five dimensions of community empowerment at the operational level, and there have been few attempts to use a design perspective building and developing an empowered community. As a result, this paper aims to introduce the perspective of service design, thereby creating a design process of community empowerment. The Wen-Ling community in West Central District in Tainan was selected as a elder caring case to observe that how the service design perspective can facilitate the building of community empowerment. The meal delivery service for local elders living alone in this community is also selected as a design issue in our investigation. The case study result reveals that, following the service process and corresponding tools, a empowered community can be built towards a service design perspective by identifying the gap in the community, recognizing the knowledge and skills in the community, building the local involvement based on shared experience, and co-working to identify and execute the networking plan in turn.