Live Piloting and Prototyping Services

This paper presents current trends in service design research concerning large scale projects aimed at generating changes at a local scale. The strategy adopted to achieve this, is to co-design solutions including future users in the development process, prototyping and testing system of products and services before their actual implementation. On the basis of experience achieved in the European Project Life 2.0, this paper discusses which methods and competencies are applied in the development of these projects, eliciting the lessons learnt especially from the piloting phase in which the participatory design (PD) approach plays a major role. In the first part, the topic is introduced jointly with the theoretical background where the user center design and participatory design methods are presented; then the Life 2.0 project development is described; finally the experience is discussed from a service design perspective, eliciting guidelines for piloting and prototyping services in a real context of use. The paper concludes reflecting on the designers’ role and competencies needed in this process

A Community Centered Design approach to developing service prototypes *

Abstract This paper presents Feeding Milan, an ongoing research project on sustainable "place" development, focusing on the importance of using a Community Centred Design approach (CCD) and service prototyping as strategies to build collaborative food networks. In this framework sustainable urban and periurban development is the central objective of the work, where the hypothesis that only by using local resources and by activating collaborative and open services it is possible to pursue real, tangible and effective improvements in quality of life and environmental benefits. The CCD approach is presented, then the authors outline a service design tool developed for co-designing with and within the local food communities and they define the process of service prototyping applied to an on-field case. The paper concludes by describing the project as a Living Lab, where the aim is to point out how service design may improve the quality of life in rururban areas by involving local communities in targeted steps of the solution development process, in order to support agricultural activities and shorten up the food chain