The Service Design lab works primarly on three interconnected areas:

• design management and strategy
• civic service design
• data driven service design.

Strategy and design

We promote research on methods and approaches to use Service Design as a strategic tool towards innovation in business and in the public sector, looking at the possible contribution of Service Design to the definition of solutions in complex and multifaceted contexts, such as urban environments, policy making, and government action.

Civic Service Design

We promote service design as a strategic approach to social innovation, supporting the participation of citizens to the co-creation processes, promoting inclusion, social and environmental sustainability.

The Civic Service Design area includes the analysis of strategies for promoting the scalability of tailor-made experiments, intended both as scaling out, i.e. reproducing innovation from the original experimental niche to new contexts, and scaling up, i.e. analysing tools and methods to “institutionalise” innovation, thus generating change in policies, government, social practices and, on a large scale, socio-cultural contexts.

Data-Driven Service Design

We focus on understanding how data can be creatively used in the different phases of the design process, and how current technologies and data practices can support the designer and complement their toolkit.

We also research how the digitalization of public services influences citizens' access to them and how the concept of data as commons can transform the value co-creation process in designing data-driven services.