community services for milan of expo 2015.designing a community-based service to better navigate the transforming city of today (and tomorrow)

or: what are we going to do this week?

alta scuola politecnicaspring school 2014

stefano mirti, belgirate, may 2014

before to start,to frame the theme,i would like you to check these three links.

they refer to watch the videos related to three projects i worked at in the past (or now):

- design 101 (or, design basics)- torino geodesign- social media for Expo 2015

design 101, technically speaking, is a MOOC (massive on-line open course).

regarding our interests, design 101 is an experiment in terms of “service design”.

the question it poses are several. let’s start with three of them:

- is it possible to imagine knowledge dissemination (aka school), processed in a completely different way?

- can you organize a class in the same way you would organize a community?

- can you overlap the digital and the physical world?

design 101 for iversity

torino geodesign was an interesting project we did in 2008: 50 communities, 50 designers, 50 companies.

inventing and imagining new products and new services for themselves and for the city.

a completely different way to look at the design process.

here you have the link to the website

here you have the link to the essay: the people of a city

here you have the link to the essay: a ‘how-to’ guide (or: the cultural event in the age of technical reproducibility

the third example is the social media work we are doing for Expo 2015.

again, it is a community based project.

how to network together the hundreds (thousand) communities and people spinning around Expo 2015.

here you have the link to the web aggregator

now we can start to write down some keywords useful for our work:

community of practiceneed / desire

community-basedbottom-up (as opposed to top-down)

material / immaterialdigital / physical

here some other links, helping us to focus even more on what we’ll do this week:

- adotta una pecora (adopt a sheep)- lulu and the book on demand concept- gnammo (the social restaurant)- restaurant day- airbnb

one more thing:be visionary!

another (very important) thing:

don’t make easy and simple assumptions in terms of medium and media.be sharp on this part of your work:challenge given rules and habits.

imagine new uses, hacks, hybridizations.

ask yourself: “what if?”

here a link for you to chek:the medieval helpdesk

(you see what i mean?)

another thing we like very much, is: “critical design”.

wikipedia gives us this definition:

a critical design will often challenge its audience's preconceptions and expectations thereby provoking new ways of thinking about the object, its use, and the surrounding environment.

critical designers generally believe design that provokes, inspires, makes us think, and questions fundamental assumptions can make a valuable contribution to debates about the role technology plays in everyday life.

here the link

until now we’ve been talking about the theme.now we can talk about the organization of our workshop.

what are our parameters of success,how we will work,and what are you supposed to work at during the week.

1. parameters of success2. how we work3. what we will do during the week

parameters of success:

- to improve your professional network (colleagues, tutors, teachers, guests)

- to learn how to make a project (in a short time), with people you are not familiar with

- to be able to transfer the inputs you get this week into other projects / activities of yours

- together with your team, you produce an interesting prototype

very important!

design is about the process

first you design the process, then you get the (final) product

this week, the challenge is to shape a good process, focus on the process and the final product will come out (hopefully)

how we work:

1. we work in team, each team has 5 people2. the teams are set (you don’t decide who are your teammates)3. in each team there are people with different skills4. later on today we give you the team list

we know quite well that this looks like a nightmare.

but real life is a nightmare, hence this has a quite good educational value.

how to deal with unknown people, with a differentmindset: this is part of the design challenge.

how to get the best of every person in the team,this is another bit of the challenge.

don’t forget:if your team fail, you can’t succeed.but then (horrendously), if your team succeed, you still can fail (it sounds unfair, it is actually unfair).

most important challenge:

make different peoplestriving for a common goal

life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand wellrobert louis stevenson

this applies to life, as well as to group work

what do we do this week?

day 1 (today): it’s about documentation and finding examples, inspiration, case-studies.brainstorming and mind-mapping. go broad.

day 2 (wed): it’s about shaping up your idea.choose one direction and start to get the whole concept set. from the general to details (and viceversa).go deep.

day 3 (thu): it’s about checking what are people are doing (can you improve your thing?). then, finalizing your project.

day 4 (fri): presenting.that’s it. it was short, wasn’it?

don’t forget a very relevant fact:

design process goes in loops and recursion

foryourcommunity.it

thank you for your attention, i hope the whole thing was clear and you know what to do

stefano mirti, belgirate, 6th of may 2014

@stefi_idlab on twitter and instagramstefano mirti on facebook