A Service Design Experiment in the Municipality of Turin to Overcome Organisational Silos

In light of fiscal austerity and mounting pressure to meet new and emerging social needs, governments across Europe are finding the need to experiment with new methods and approaches to serving citizens. An intermediary, supporting infrastructure is growing around the need to increase the innovation capacity of public sector organizations. This can be seen in the rise of public innovation labs, internal innovation teams/labs and consulting services directed specifically at public innovation. These intermediaries often employ approaches, methods and tools coming from the design field, most often grouped under ‗design thinking‘. Considering the complex nature of the social problems and the complexity of the socio-technical systems in which they are embedded, design processes must include a wide range of actors in order to gather the necessary knowledge to properly frame and solve the problem. Design processes in these settings often take on a participatory nature, providing a collaborative, and more democratic, approach to problem resolution. In order to understand better how design is helping governments increase their innovation capacity, a 4-month experimentation, under the SIC H2020 project, was conducted with the Municipality of Turin. The objective was to help them design a new service and in the process overcome organizational barriers to innovation, of which include a highly, siloed organizational structure. While the process confirmed some of the initial hypotheses regarding the potential of co-design in contributing to organizational transformation through the translation of new knowledge, three critical points emerged from the experimentation which provide useful insight for future research and experimentation.