Erice Intensive School - Report

September 25th - October 3rd 2015 | Erice (TP)

The Project Vision

The “City as a Service” Intensive School has been the first educational program launched by PUSH (Sept. 25th - Oct. 3rd, 2015) in the field of service design.

The program examined how this approach can improve services, making them more compelling to users’ needs. The main objective of the program was to share the most common methodologies and processes in the field of service design and to show how it can increase competitiveness even in difficult contexts. Designing services based on real and urgent needs can be a faster and more effective way to foster growth and improve the quality of life.

Due to the multidisciplinarity of the topic, the program has been addressed to professionals and students aged 18-35, not only with a background in architecture and design but to all those young professionals who wish to broaden their understanding of innovation and design as a collaborative process.

PUSH has decided to host the program in Erice, one of the most beautiful villages in Italy also known as the mediterranean city for science and peace, but still located in a region where the quality of services and innovation level is far away from the european standards and there’s an urgent need to introduce new practices.

The School has been also a preparatory event for the “City as a Service” Urban Thinkers Campus, international conference promoted by the United Nations and organized by PUSH, that took place in Palermo from the 8th to the 10th of October 2015.

The Intensive School in numbers

17

age

students different backgrounds Architecture and Design, Urban Planning, Environmental Engineering, Economics, Project Management, UX Design and Creative Design.

22 y.o.

38 y.o.

28 y.o.

Average

gender

12 F 5M nationalities

13

guests

Valeria Adani Bologna

Guglielmo Apolloni

Service Designer and Design Thinking Coach | Epoca Participation Designer | School Raising

Berlino

Melvin Brand Flu

Director of Strategy and Business Design | Livework

Rotterdam

Claudia Busetto

UX Designer and Digital communication | Impact Hub Siracusa

Siracusa

Gabriele Caeti Milano

Matteo Cevese Trento

Gabriele Cucinella Milano

Ingwio D’Hespeel Ghent

Vincenzo Di Maria Siracusa

Benedikt Gross Monaco

Fabio Maria Montagnino

Creative Supervisor | We are Social Communication Manager | TechPeaks Co-Founder and Managing Director | We are Social Interaction Designer | LUCA School of Arts Service Designer and Network Catalyst | Impact Hub Siracusa Service Designer and Design Thinking Coach | Moovel Director | Consorzio Arca

Palermo

Gabriele Musella Londra

Alessandro Pirani Milano

Head of product & UX | Belle Public Policy Consultant | CO Gruppo

Program Overview DAY 1 | Welcome Day Understanding context, presentation of the project goals and objectives, networking and social dinner.

DAY 2 | Team building Day Excursion around “Saline di Trapani” Nature Reserve and historic centre. Participants’ Petcha Kucha: presentations made by students about their profile, background and expectations.

DAY 3 | Citizens Experience Melvin Brand Flu, “Citizen’s frustration, user’s irritation, human’s anger” Analysing the relationship between city - services - citizens and the difference between users citizens - humans in order to learn how to understand a context and find out priorities and feelings of main players/citizens within a synoptic framework.

DAY 4 | Ideas Generation Ingwio D’Hespeel, Benedikt Gross, “You, the city and us: new ways to look on your city” Case studies and professional experiences to propose different approaches to detect the existing problems and thus find appropriate solutions. Students through brainstorming and graphical visualization exercises started identifying the problems they intended to solve.

DAY 5 | MVS Gabriele Musella, “Grandma-proof innovation. When 1 hour of user research saves you 10 hours of development time” Alessandro Pirani “Lean policies. Or: how to set an evidence-based public service hacking a validation board” How to validate ideas using surveys, interviews and other strategies to assess whether the solution can be considered useful and interesting by users. Learning how to build a stakeholder map, in order to understand how to interact with main players to gain their attention and support to develop ideas.

DAY 6 | Testing Vincenzo Di Maria, “Thinking with your hands, making ideas tangible: a practical approach to service innovation” Valeria Adani “Prototyping and co-creation: how to involve end-users as experts of their experiences in designing product service systems” Presentations and small interactive experiences to show how important is conducting testing activities by interacting with people or by building physical prototypes instead of testing ideas through mental processes and theoretical methods. Building the solution’ storyboard to point out how users can interact with the solution in order to identify also potential criticisms.

DAY 7 | Improve Guglielmo Apolloni, “Enabling services for Enabling cities: what I’ve learnt from practices where the process is the service and how to design new ones” Claudia Busetto “50 shades of feedback: tools and methods to understand, organise and transform data into knowledge” Exploring methods to collect feedbacks from users, a great way to understand the problems the broader communities experiences and the solutions they would appreciate. Using strategies to gain neutral feedbacks, thus avoiding social and relational taboos.

DAY 8 | How to pitch Gabriele Caeti, GABRIELE CUCINELLA, “Well $old - How to pitch great ideas” Fabio Maria Montagnino, “Out of Flatland: a conversation about multidimensional innovation pathways” Learning how to present the idea to the audience, using an effective storytelling able to attract the attention of users and stakeholders. Analysing all the dimensions that each project proposal should present to be evaluated positively: financial, human and environmental sustainability, innovation and scalability.

DAY 9 | Pitch Day Matteo Cevese, “Building local communities: coordinating actions, pushing changes onto public administration - the case of Trentino” Building innovation communities, the case of Trentino Region as an example of a participatory technology hub involving citizens and communities.

Final Session with presentation of the project proposals developed by the 4 teams of students

Outcomes 4 teams 4 ideas of services LikeaLocal

Community, Social integration

It integrates newcomers into communities quickly, by providing visual system of experience suggestions created by the citizens of communities.

TeachMeAbit

Education, Culture

An innovative way of learning by Teaching. Choose the subject, do your lesson, share the contents.

UrbanWin

Revitalisation of urban spaces, Gamification

It is a game that aims to reactivate marginalized urban spaces through missions that allow players to be actors of the urban regenerations.

NeighbourGood

Open Data, Real Estate

A system to find the neighbourhood that suits to your needs.

Awards Best Idea: All costs covered to setup a cooperative in Italy; free use of a coopup coworking space for the entire team for one year anywhere in Italy.

LikeaLocal

Best Presentation: Chance to record a video of the idea to be streamed during the Palermo Urban Thinkers Campus; one week at Livework Studio in Rotterdam to use the space, meet the team and learn how they work in the field of service design TeachMeAbit

Feedbacks

75%

of the students have declared that they decided to apply to the Intensive School in order to acquire new skills for their profession

56%

of them said they had never dealt with service design before

78%

of them think that their skills improved a lot because of their participation to the Intensive School

The other students were really interesting people. Mentors who came from companies working in the service design field were great! Super interesting methods came from Marzia’s lecture. Good starting point to learn service design, organization was great!

Michele Anzalone, PhD student in Urban and Regional Planning at University of Palermo

I appreciated the process, the themes, interactions and informal chats with students and mentors out of the formal activities, but also the activities and presentations were great although their intensity and strangeness, given my lack of prior design experience Prince Guma, Researcher and Director at Social Economic Research and Development (SERD) - Kampala

What I appreciated most was the process itself. Some guests were pretty awesome and shared some game-changing views and experiences. Learning by doing kind of approach to every step of the process Sharon Ambrosio, Architect Urban and Social Strategist_Cofounder at UrbanIta - London *Source: Evaluation survey, PUSH October 2015

Sponsors

Partners