Co-Designing with Migrants’ Easier Access to Public Services: A Technological Perspective

first_pagesettings Open AccessArticle Co-Designing with Migrants’ Easier Access to Public Services: A Technological Perspective by Grazia Concilio 1ORCID,Giuliana Costa 1,Maryam Karimi 1,*ORCID,Maria Vitaller del Olmo 2 andOlga Kehagia 3 1 Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milan, Italy 2 Service Design Lab, Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, 2450 Copenhagen, Denmark 3 Department of Economics, University of Thessaly, 38333 Volos, Greece * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Academic Editor: Carlos Teixeira Soc. Sci. 2022, 11(2), 54; https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci11020054 Received: 19 November 2021 / Revised: 19 January 2022 / Accepted: 21 January 2022 / Published: 29 January 2022 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Enabling (Im)migrants Integration Through ICT Innovation Solutions: Challenges, Opportunities, Pitfalls and Obstacles) Download PDF Browse Figures Citation Export Abstract The integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers remains a challenge for both public authorities and local communities at the national, regional, and local levels. For migrants, the lack of information and inability to use technology due to insufficient access skills and proficiency in the language of the host country may lead to limited interaction with the new community and consequently to social exclusion. One of the issues of the hyper-complexity in migrant integration can be related to a problem of communication that not only involves the migrants also the local administrators and service providers. This problem requires systemic solutions rather than simple “ad hoc” solutions. This article describes the case of the easyRights project, an ongoing Horizon 2020 project aimed at improving migrants’ access to public services to ease exercising their rights. It presents the application of a co-design learning framework for the development of hackathons that aim to improve existing services. It also promotes the collaborative design of solutions that use ICTs to overcome the bureaucratic and idiomatic barriers migrants experience in their interactions with formal procedures. The example of the four ecosystems generated in the four pilot cities of the project shows the relevance of interconnecting stakeholders in the co-design of services and the potential of exploiting the multifaceted attributes of ICTs to solve the complexity in the access to such services. The results invite reflection on the necessity of exploring the capability of technology application through user-centric approaches to offer substantial solutions to the imperative—yet intricate—challenge of migrants’ inclusion in society.