Service Design Book Club with Cameron Tonkinwise
Cameron Tonkinwise is our guest speaker for the online book club event in June.
Author: David Graeber
Guest Speaker: Cameron Tonkinwise
Topic: What Service Designers can learn from David Graeber?
Overview: David Graeber was an anthropologist but also an activist and anarchist.
Graeber published an examination of 'debt' – the idea that one person might feel indebted to another. Midway through his large survey, Graeber felt the need to set out three core kinds of social relations: communism, exchange and hierarchy.
- Communism is the idea that people, especially within communities they feel a part of, will help each other whenever they are able to.
- Exchange is the idea that people can be persuaded to help another person for a defined period if they are offered recompense.
- Hierarchy is the idea that people feel compelled to fulfil the requests of people with some traditional form of status.
For Cameron, these ideas seem central to explaining different ways in which service relations can be designed, and so he always began teaching Service Design by looking at Graeber's set of social relations.
Cameron finds that this foundation helps service designers think about services as 'the co-creation of value,' situations in which strangers collaborate, one person helping another person help them. Graeber helps service designers pay attention to the role of gifts, agreements, and respect in person-to-person services whether commercial, governmental or community-based.
Cameron will provide examples from his own government-agency and financial institution based service design projects.Chapter for reference: Chapter 5: A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations
Join us for an engaging conversation with Cameron and fellow service design enthusiasts!
Event details
Date: Thursday, June 4, 2026
Time: 10 am to 11 pm (EST) | 4 pm to 5 pm (CET) | Time zone converter
Location: Online event
Agenda
Introductions - 5 minutes
Overview of the topic by Cameron - 20 minutes (will be recorded)
Conversations with Cameron - 30 minutes
Note: The Zoom link will be shared with registered participants.
About the guest speaker
Professor Cameron Tonkinwise is an international expert in design studies and transition design and the Research Director of the Design Innovation Research Centre at UTS.
He writes and speaks extensively on the power of design to drive systems-level change to achieve more sustainable and equitable futures.
Cameron has long advocated for the field of Design Studies and its importance to ensuring the social responsibility of design professionals.
His expertise has reshaped traditional thinking around how designers should be educated, and he has established Design Studies programs at the Parsons The New School for Design (New York), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and UTS, among others, that have transformed international design curricula. He has written a number of influential articles on design thinking, design ethics, design research and speculative design.
More recently, Cameron has emerged as a leading voice in the field of Transition Design, as part of his long-standing research and teaching around Sustainable Design.
He was an early champion of the Sharing Economy while taking over the leadership of the EcoDesign Foundation from its founders, Tony Fry & Anne-Marie Willis. This expertise shapes Cameron’s work at the Design Innovation Research Centre at UTS, which has a focus on multidisciplinary social and service design research.
Under Cameron’s leadership, the research team now incorporates a transition design focus into their projects, tackling immediate, organisation-specific design challenges while simultaneously addressing the underlying systemic issues that cause these challenges to occur.
Current work includes a project to help Australian banks transition toward more inclusive services and even act on behalf of vulnerable community members suffering financial abuse, and a project to help energy providers better understand how to design changes in everyday household life that will enable more sustainable distributed energy systems.
Cameron is a highly sought-after speaker at academic and industry conferences and events: among others, he has delivered invited keynote addresses at NorDes, LeanAgile Scotland, the Australian Design Research Conference, AgileAustralia, and Media Architecture Biennale.
He has been on the editorial board of of Design Philosophy Papers since 2003 and Design and Culture since 2009; he is also a regular reviewer of articles for Design Studies and book manuscripts for Bloomsbury.
About Service Design Book Club
Please read about our first meet-up on Medium, visit our website, and follow our LinkedIn page or LinkedIn newsletter for information about the upcoming events.
If you have any questions before our meet-up, please feel free to send them to [email protected].
Code of Conduct
Service Design Book Club is dedicated to providing a harassment-free event experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), or technology choices.
We do not tolerate harassment of event participants in any form.
We value your attendance!
(This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.)