DESIGNING SERVICES IN PANDEMIC CONTEXT

This paper addresses the challenge posed by COVID 19 to 60 bachelor students from the 3rd year of the Design Programme at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon, that had to develop design services (in groups of 3/4 students) without the possibility of doing fieldwork or any other type of presential interaction. The imposed lockdown due to Coronavirus dictated not only changes on the themes and problems to be tackled but also introduced the need to adopt new processes and tools to collect, discuss and interpret information. By the end of the course, 13 projects were developed (but not implemented) and 13 promotional videos were created to disseminate the work done. The projects were mostly focused on developing services to support old people, high education students, risk communities considering the adverse consequences of the virus in daily life and the wellbeing of people. Besides mentioning the main target groups, it is also important to refer to the areas of intervention that were chosen: mobility, education, security, health. The critical analysis of the design processes as well as of the results of the work done in this design services' course allowed us to suggest numerous guidelines on how to collaborate in an effective way in design processes in a pandemic context that will hopefully help the academic community as well as students to better frame and act in this type of impacting situations. © PDE 2021.