New Service Models and New Service Places in Times of Crisis: How citizens’ activism is changing the way we design services.

In this paper we discuss how citizens' activism is changing the way we design services, introducing new service models and places, and therefore, a new role for service designers. The reference framework is ‘the bright side of the crisis’, a scenario characterized by a significant wave of bottom-up activism, in which citizens are starting to design and produce a new generation of collaborative services, in order to respond to the deficit of services in our cities. As service designers we are particularly interested in such phenomena and in the transformation of bottom-up activities in actual services, using co-design and community centred design. In this scenario, one significant example is "Creative Citizens", a project generated within the design doctoral programme of Politecnico di Milano. Building upon this applied-research activity, we wish to better define the new service models arising in this scenario and, consequently, the related service places emerging as points of connection among citizens, designers, stakeholders and institutions. Finally, looking attentively at Creative Citizens' results, we wish to focus more on the role of designers in shaping this social learning process: they are more than facilitators because they are able to inspire and lead a community.