The document summarizes two design projects in Milan that used participatory design approaches to address social challenges. In the first project, called Peripheria, services like material sharing and community activities were co-designed with local residents to improve a neighborhood. This led to indirect results like the municipality and university collaborating on neighborhood plans. The second project, MyNeighborhood, co-designed gardening and food services in Quarto Oggiaro to address social inclusion; this impacted local school curricula. The document discusses how design must consider its contextual situation and can influence factors like organizations, policies and assumptions through situated practice.

1. Service Design in Public Sector: Boosting
innovation through design
ServDes 2016
Copenhagen 25th May
Francesca Rizzo
University of Bologna
Alessandro Deserti
Onur Cobanli
Politecnico di Milano

2. Some experiences in field research
and practice

3. The Periphèria Project: the Milano pilot
Peripheria is a EU funded project aiming at experimenting
new smart city services.
Politecnico di Milano, as a project partner, decided to pilot
new services in the neighbourhood where its campus is
located, involving people from the campus and from the
neighbourhood as co-designers and co-producers.

4. The Periphèria project. Direct results
&CO: extend the
lifecycle of materials
responding to two
different needs
Stick Around:
supporting people
self-organised
activities
Toc Toc: helping
each other in a
sharing community
Programme of sport
events in Piazza Leonardo
da Vinci (first edition)
Programme of sport
events in Piazza Leonardo
da Vinci (second edition)

5. The Periphèria project. Indirect results
Politecnico di Milano tookthe initiative and developed the long-
term vision for the neighbourhood, becoming the main player in
the process of change;
The Milano municipality joined the co-design process;
The experimental apps developed within the project are funded
and commercialised
The Municipality is co-design with Politecnico a new square

6. The MyNeighborhood project. The Milano pilot
MyN has been a EU-funded project (2013-2015) that
aimed to identify and support the establishment and the
upscale of grassroots and community-based
initiatives, through the adoption of a web-based service
platform.
Quarto Oggiaro is the Milano Neighborhood where the
project experimented co-design to address problems of
social inclusion of young and elderly people.

7. The MyN project. Direct results
The Quarto Gardening service: the Quarto Oggiaro
school of agriculture supported the neighbourhood in
the maintenance of the green areas.

8. The MyN project. Direct results
The Quarto Food Club service: the Quarto Oggiaro hotel
school supported the neighbourhood in offering meals to
elderly people as a way of improving their social life.

9. The MyN Project. Indirect results
The engagement of the employees of the municipality in the
design experiments has activated knowledge transfer
processes, triggering changes in the organisation.
Quarto Gardening and Quarto Food services led to changes
in the protocols (needed to redesign the students’ curricula)
of the involved public schools.

10. First conclusion from the field

11. The situatedness of design
Complex participatory design as a systemic action
involving a large number of actors and stakeholders in a
frame of tensions or open conflicts.
It postulates going beyond the established UCD practice,
extending the idea of participation in the design process.

12. Back from design thinking to design culture
The introduction of DT in the domain of business
Design thinking is … a discipline that uses the designer's
sensibility and methods to match people's needs with what
is technologically feasible and what a viable business can
convert into consumer value and market opportunity.
(Tim Brown, 2008)

13. Back from design thinking to design culture
The critiques to design thinking
_ The is no such thing as design thinking;
_ It does not take into account the situatedness of the
design practice;
_ It extends rather than bridge the gap between thinking
and doing;
_ It is indifferent to competences;
_ It affects only the top of the organizations without
penetrating into their depth;
_ It has become a managerial fad.

14. Design thinking is a useful myth.
(Don Norman, 2010)
Back from design thinking to design culture
The critiques to design thinking

15. If designers are going to realize the full potential of
design thought, then they should also learn to analyze
how the situations that frame design practice are
themselves constructed. [It is necessary to] move from a
focus on design as something as floating free in a
universalized or decontextualized set of arrangements to
design as always itself part of particular historical,
cultural, political arrangements that in turn have
consequences for its possibilities.
(Victor Margolin, 2002).
The situatedness of design

16. The situatedness of design culture
The idea of design context.
Agents
Actors, stakeholders, …
Environment
Tangible and intangible
spaces and infrastructures
Situation
Circumstance or occasion that leads to a
problem to be solved
Design practice
context

17. Interpretative frame

18. Design projects as context-infrastructure for the
implementation of the interactive playground

19. Interpretative frame
Design processes are not just introducing solutions, but
also changing the frame where those solutions are
introduced.
Context is not only an ex-ante entity that we can
analyze, draw information from and interpret before the
design action, but a living environment that might be
transformed during the design process.

20. Interpretative frame
One of the agents that may be significantly transformed
through and during the design process is the
organisation that leads the design process itself.
On this we based some reflections on the relation
between design and organisational change in public
sector.
What
We do
Values
Culture
Shook’s model
Change
behaviour to
change culture
Shein’s model
Change
assumptions to
change
behaviour
Visible
Invisible

21. Interpretative frame
The new territories of application of design approaches
and methods typically amplify the systemic dimension of
the problems to be faced.
Those that we used to consider the traditional design
objects can be seen as terminals of complex systems, that
may become the very object of the transformation.

22. Interpretative frame and conclusions
The risk for designers entering these territories is twofold:
_ seeing just the top of the iceberg;
_ imagining that design by itself may have the capacity of
changing the system as a whole.

23. Conclusions

24. The introduction of the participatory design
perspective per se does not seem enough
to establish adequate new practices.
- Con%nuous media%on with the already established prac%ces
is needed;
- Extension of the no%on of par%cipatory design to advanced
PD or complex par%cipatory design for alignment and design
culture interiorisa%on;
- Reconnec%on of the small and bo@om-up projects and
ini%a%ves to the whole strategic vision;
- Bounding of design projects with the management of the
organisa%onal change.

25. Organisational change issues are actually unknown to
most of the designers
The cases show how the concep%on and delivery of the new
services is bound to the crea%on of networks and partnerships
that in turn require the development of new policies.
Some of the service design tools - such as the “actors mapping”,
the “stakeholders’ matrix”, apparently put both feet in the field
of organisa%onal change without a sound understanding of its
complexity.

26. Design culture and organisa0onal change
The introduc%on of design culture in the public sector is in its
ini%al phases: design methods and tools are s%ll largely unknown
by public ins%tu%ons and design knowledge is s%ll far from having
entered the public organisa%ons at a large scale, affec%ng their
daily processes and their underpinned culture.

27. SIC – Social Innova0on Community
2016-2019
Francesca Rizzo, University of Bologna
f.rizzo@unibo.it

28. SAVE THE
DATE
20th 23rd
Sept 2016
SIC Summer School: Urban
Social Innovation
20th - 23rd September, Tilburg
In conjunction with the European SI Week
Morning session 9.00 -12.00
20 September
Focus day 1:
Municipalities and
cultural change.
Learning how to
implement SI through the
application of co-design
approach on Urban Social
challenges
Case study presentation
on diversity, ageing and
inclusion
21 September
Focus day 2: The role of
intermediaries on Urban SI
scaling-up
Learning how to facilitate,
reconnect and synergy actors
and stakeholders to build a
diffuse SI city platform
Case study presentation on
Unemployment and economic
systems
22 September
Focus day 3: Developing
Urban SI ecosystems.
Learning about
intermediaries,
infrastructures, citizens
innovation networks and
Policy Design
Case study presentation on
environment and climate
change
23 September
Focus day 4: Social
Innovation network
governance.
Leaning about
visions, strategies
and methods
Afternoon session 14.00 – 18.00 Interactive session with participants
Thematic strands of the
working groups:
1. Unemployment and
economic systems
2. Diversity, ageing and
inclusion
3. Environment and
climate change
Thematic strands of the
working groups:
• Unemployment and
economic systems
• Diversity, ageing and
inclusion
• Environment and
climate chance
Thematic strands of the
working groups:
1. Unemployment and
economic systems
2. Diversity, ageing and
inclusion
3. Environment and
climate change
Lessons learned,
results for networks
and SuS 2017 / 2018