Engagement Lab, an applied research and design lab associated with Emerson College that investigates and creates media and technology to reduce disparities in civic participation, announced via a twitter thread the launch of Making a Smart City Civic, an open toolkit to ensure smart cities serve all of us. We reproduce the thread here: From […]

Challenging The City Scale: Journeys in People-Centred Design Ed. by Cité du Design (Saint-Etienne) and Clear Village (London) Birkhäuser, 2018, 176 pages (free ebook) This 176 pages book is released by the famous international publisher Birkhäuser, and co-edited by Cité du design Saint-Etienne and Clear Village London, with the contributions of all the partners and […]

How can technology lead to more participation in democratic processes? Who should own and control city data? Can cities embrace a model that socializes data and encourages new forms of cooperativism and democratic innovation? Albert Cañigueral interviewed Francesca Bria, the chief innovation officer of Barcelona. A short excerpt about culture: Albert Cañigueral: There is no […]

In Boston, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is conducting ethnographic, human-centered research to design middle-income housing that reflects people’s lived experiences, reports the Stanford Social Innovation Review. This includes intensive planning sessions in which residents, designers, and policy experts co-create policy blueprints. As part of these efforts, Boston set up a roadshow with […]

Governments, public sector and community organisations are addressing increasingly complex challenges such as the ageing society, climate change, sustainable behaviour change, youth unemployment, impacts of austerity, health, housing and homelessness. They are doing this at a time when there is a growing gap between the needs and expectations of the public on the one hand […]

The radical Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, known for his pioneering social housing projects in Latin America, has been named as the winner of the 2016 Pritzker prize, the highest accolade in architecture. The 48-year-old, who is also the curator of this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, has made a name for himself over the past decade […]

An increasing number of cities are using co-creation platforms to tackle challenging issues like mobility, air quality and urban regeneration too. The Nexthamburg project, for example, was launched in 2009 to source innovative and creative ideas for urban development in Hamburg. Medellín, Columbia, has also developed a platform called Mi Medellín to sound-out citizen solutions […]

As a Fulbright grantee, Emily Hong spent part of the last year researching the sharing economy in Seoul. One of her main findings? Korea actually has two. The first is small-scale, hyper local and socialist in flavor. This first “sharing Seoul” is largely supported by the Seoul Metropolitan government, and consists of a handful of […]

Acclaimed anthropologist Stefana Broadbent leads a new “Collective Intelligence” unit at Nesta, the UK innovation charity, that is “looking at ways to support the emergence of Collective Intelligence to solve complex societal issues”. More concretely, they are studying how patient organisations can use different platforms to integrate clinical and lay knowledge to help sufferers and […]

At the core of a People Powered Health approach is collective ownership of health and wellbeing. Professionals need to start from the position of not necessarily knowing the right answer, which is a significant challenge. Creating a health system driven by the people within it, not by the institutions that provide care, requires engagement in […]

The Designing Design Education for India (DDEI) Conference, which will take place in March 2013 in Pune, India, has an unusual, but engaging format: “This will be an interactive conference. Unlike other conferences where the presenters speak from one side and the attendees are mere spectators or at the most the discussion is confined to […]

The Club of Helsinki is a non-profit organization that offer possibilities to co-create urban development projects that prototype new integrated and sustainable business and management models. The organization is founded by designer Ilkka Suppanen and strategist Tanya Kim Grassley, in close collaboration with innovator Karina Vissonova and ambassador Brent Richards. In 2013 The Club of […]

SDT2012 was the first international conference on service design thinking in the travel and tourism industry. For the first time, the conference brought together a community interested in the practical application of service design thinking within the travel and tourism industry. The conference was the closing event of the project “Service Design in Tourism” funded […]

In a short post on the Huffington Post blog, author Soren Petersen describes how co-design – when firms and non-design users jointly design business and product offerings – is seen as a potential new avenue for breakthrough innovation in design. “Inviting expert users and normal users to contribute their ideas has been used in design […]