Conference Agenda

This paper contributes to the discussion on the roles and pedagogy of design, based on a case study of collaboration between government and academia. The authors are design practice researchers and civil servants and present a collaborative case study from Spring 2023 that aimed at developing anticipatory innovation capability in the UK’s Government Digital Service, involving postgraduate service design students and exploring critical service design (Salinas, 2022, 2023) as an alternative way of contributing to the formulation of public policies and services. The collaboration led to new competencies in public design for those involved and resulted in the creation of a new in-house anticipatory innovation unit in government. The authors draw on the student proposal ‘Ministry of Biodiversity’ as an exemplar to contextualize and illustrate their collaborative practice. The paper concludes with a discussion of the insights gained from this collaboration regarding the roles and pedagogy of design in government.

Living lab is widely adopted for renewing public services and policy. In establishing living labs, however, practitioners face the realities of the locale that influences the formation and operation of living labs. This paper reports on a single case-study, in which a group of design researchers attempted to set up a smart mobility living lab in Korea. By thematically analyzing meeting notes and a workshop, we uncover the challenges faced during preject phase. Our findings suggest that, while the uncertain and iterative nature of living lab is incompatible with the operational model of the public-sector in Korea, its name and participatory aspect are being enforced upon by ministries in distributing funds for grass-root actions and R&D projects albeit mostly on the surface level. The limited engagements predetermined by the funding schemes may impair learning and evolution – the key benefits of living labs as an open and participatory innovation process.

We explore the role of futures-oriented design interventions in leveraging socio-technical controversies to foster collective imagination. We elaborate on a practical application of a speculative and scenario-based design tool called Future Frictions. Our study focuses on the use of Future Frictions to engage citizens in the development of an assessment framework for implementing sensors in Amsterdam. By employing the "controversing" framework to operationalize controversies through design, we explore how Future Frictions provides an interface that bridges speculative and real-life urban contexts. This interface facilitates recontextualizing controversies in daily life, fostering sensemaking, and making space for collective agency. This, we argue, nurtures collective imagination to generate counter-narratives that open alternative smart city futures. In addition to contributing to responsible smart city developments, we offer inspiration for utilizing design to reimagine and deploy creative forms of engagement to inform decision-making and policy-making addressing societal challenges in different domains.

The study targets the municipality of Quero Vas (Belluno, Italia), an area characterized by historical heritage and demographic decline. Employing a qualitative mapping from Raffaella Fagnoni methodology (Traces, Stories, Actions, Events, Imaginary) the researchers identified that the environmental heritage is one of the main strategic local contexts on which the designers can operate.

This heritage is locally considered by two perspectives: the governance, committed to regeneration, frames the landscape as a resource for economic growth through tourism; the communities of hikers and climbers, frame the landscape as a resource for sharing experiences. The two perspectives currently don’t engage citizens, who are excluded from a relationship with both. In this context of territorial design and marginal area enhancement, the study proposes a project centered on providing cultural enrichment for citizens. It aims to bridge the gap between economic and recreational values while promoting the collective care and preservation of the territory.