Articles

The blogs and essays you read here

Here I will write about the work I am currently working on and the work I plan to do in the near future. My approach in this writing will be to share my personal experience of pursuing my career in the fields I am interested in. With the extreme fluctuations of life in Iran, perhaps some of them came to fruition, some stopped in the middle of the road, and some I had to abandon before I even started. My favorite fields in my current career path, are related to the path I have taken so far, but each of them is a different way of continuing the path of design. The essays related to the Anthropology section and the Service Design section of this website will also be shown here. You can find them in those sections and also here.

So, for now, the topics I mostly will write about here are:

Business Anthropology
Extended Reality/XR
Transmedia Storytelling

October 17, 2026

Published by Shiva Salehnia at October 17, 2026

Fragile Agreement, Fragile Accountability

A problem can be solved in different ways. One way is for a single expert to solve it alone. In this approach, a specialist is engaged, the problem is explained to them, and they are expected to present their solution after a set period, or even, once the solution has been implemented, to report the outcome to the client

September 30, 2026

Published by Shiva Salehnia at September 30, 2026

A Stranger Among You

The creation of a viable solution to the ongoing, complex problems of an organization is the primary aim of a service design project. Given the presence of diverse stakeholders within and outside the organization, the organization's constantly shifting environment, and the various cultural, economic, and ...

September 14, 2026

Published by Shiva Salehnia at September 14, 2026

Service Designer: An Anchor for Innovation, or Merely Its Catalyst?

There is a hypothesis, one I have heard often among Iranian designers, which holds that the Iranian market neither understands design nor desires it. According to this hypothesis, the major merchants of the market—whose long-established firms command high turnover—occupy the central role in shaping other actors’ roles in the market

August 31, 2026

Published by Shiva Salehnia at August 31, 2026

Dark Side of Empathizing

Service design projects carry businesses through a problem-solving process rooted in design thinking — a five-stage process comprising discovering the problem space, defining the problem, ideation, prototyping and testing solutions, and finally implementation. This process isn’t run through just once, but repeated multiple times, and as quickly as possible, in order to reach the best possible outcome. But to get through the first stage — to more precisely discover the space in which the problem occurs — the designer must identify the key stakeholders of a problem and be able to describe the problem space from their point of view

Shiva Salehnia