Design At the Intersection Among City Challenges, New Public Services, and Policy-Making

Societies and cities are living in times of deep cultural changes. Design of course has sought to tackle city societal problems in the past, but this has largely been confined to design activism (and to the political sphere of the design action). Its main aim has been to raise awareness of specific problems and/or demonstrate dissent with mainstream cultures. In the last 10 years, however, there have been various design initiatives that have worked at city scale to solve societal challenges, producing reliable and useful solutions and valuable impacts on the life of real people. When applied to city challenges, design assumes the practice of complex participatory processes involving a large number of actors and stakeholders in tense settings or open conflicts. Complex participatory processes go beyond the established principle of designing for context-dependent problems, extending the idea of participation to include (1) the relation between the context of the problem to be addressed and the design of the network that will coproduce the solution and (2) testing different configurations of that network until a robust partnership is individualized and established in some institutional form. The contribution relies on the intuition that design can act as an agent of change for public institutions, which are currently facing new and unmet societal challenges that appear to affect cities at different levels. These include the quality of the services offered by municipalities and the way in which public institutions deal with service innovation in conditions of scarce resources, with new phenomena such as social innovation. The chapter also introduces a design-led project implemented in the framework of the My Neighborhood European Project, with a double aim, i.e., to experiment service design as a tool for designing innovation in the public sector and to experiment service design as a tool to boost innovation in the culture of a public institution (the Municipality of Milan).