Developing collaborative services in local contexts

This paper presents an ongoing applied research case of Design for “place” development (Meroni, 2011): Feeding Milan, energies for change. The project aims at restoring the sustainable food chain and the relationship between the city of Milan and its productive countryside, by activating new de-mediated services for food provision and local tourism. It advances the hypotheses by centring the design process on the communities of shareholders and potential users it is possible to design a high-quality service and, by activating local synergies, it is feasible to get high performance and well-optimised distributed system to support service delivery. The argumentation shows how such these hypotheses have been verified by the design practice during the activation of the pilot projects on the local scale. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the project improvements and to reflect on two years of research of joint work with the local players with whom designers working on Feeding Milan have started to build a significant network of multifunctional and collaborative services.