Projects

The PALIMPSEST Project aims at regenerating lost sustainability wisdom in heritage landscapes and reimagine their future, experimenting with new ways of acting and interacting. The project has a strong foundation in co-creation and brings together professionals from many different backgrounds. The project has no less than 22 partners and 3 pilot locations. 

PALIMPSEST creates an interactive archive of urban legends and stories and takes place in the regions of Epirus (GR) and Puglia (IT). The first phase of the project involved collecting these stories. During this phase, primary school students were asked to get in contact with elderly family members in order to gather information about urban legends. The second phase involved creating a mobile app with a map that pinpoints the exact locations in which the collected stories took place. During the third phase of the project, artists were invited to create interactive art installations inspired by the collected stories. The artworks were installed in the locations pinpointed in the map and visitors are able to activate them on-site. Finally, the stories, the mobile app and the art installations are interconnected in order to transform the in-situ archive of urban legends into an integrated museum experience.

See more on the projects website. 

The ZOOOM project aims at raising awareness of the importance of IP generation and management for strategies in Open Collaborative and Open Innovation ecosystems within the key assets of data, software and hardware. By involving different actors from knowledge creators (startups, researchers, SMEs) and supporting organisations (TTOs, Digital Innovation Hubs, Innovation Agencies, PATLIBs), ZOOOM wishes to first define a framework to address open innovation from a legal and a business aspect, defining case studies, success stories and cases where open innovation has been applied within a diverse range of technologies (from blockchain to AI, to robotics).

To foster Open Innovation across the knowledge creation ecosystem and its supporting entities, the SD Lab will develop a toolkit incorporating diverse platforms and tools for license and intellectual property management. The consortium will ultimately disseminate the toolkit, as well as the legal and business framework in order to promote awareness of the significance of Open Innovation within European public and private organizations.

BC4ECO aims at assisting professionals in Computer Science, Design and Environmental Engineering in utilising novel approaches for tackling climate challenges through Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs). The project aims to cultivate an innovative and decentralised approach to education that goes beyond a learner’s technical abilities, emphasising the importance of shifting learners’ mindest towards employing creative and critical thinking to tackle intricate and systemic challenges.

Key results for BC4ECO will be the development of a Pedagogical Framework and a novel curriculum “Blockchain for Sustainability” that will be tested in 2 different Summer Schools. In collaboration with Tallinn University of Technology and the University of Limerick, the Service Design Lab will develop different resources (course materials, MOOCs, tools & methods), that will inform the curriculum design and will be tested throughout different multiplier events. Eventually, we wish to raise awareness of the importance of creative ways of working with complexity and the environment and reach out to many Higher Educational Institutions in Europe.

EU-funded, EasyRights seeks a greater integration of foreign individuals and their families by increasing the quality and quantity of public (welfare) services . The project aims to provide answers to immigrants’ search of responses to different needs, contributing to their autonomy (to the extent possible) from discretionary street level bureaucracies in the navigation of the administrative system, saving time for both migrants and for social service staff, and cutting costs for the public administration. 

The Service Design Lab will assist in the co-creation of a system that involves immigrants, service providers and local actors to ease the bureaucracy procedures and facilitate the access to local services. We will put our expertise in collaborative design methodologies in the hands of the four pilot locations (Birmingham, Larissa, Palermo and Málaga) and walk them through the preparation and execution of hackathons, as well as the ulterior implementation of the generated functioning prototypes, ensuring a solid constitution of an active context-rooted ecosystem of services.

See more on the project’s website.

The CAPE project is a three-year Nordic research collaboration between IT University of Copenhagen, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Ballerup Library, Malmö University, and Aalto University, focusing on the concept of Civic Innovation Centres (CICs) as an arena for citizen-driven improvement and innovation of public-interest services.
The project will address the issues related to a digital divide in e-service use by developing Civic Innovation Centres (CICs), a novel innovation facility hosted in public libraries, where citizens engage in the improvement of current e-services, as well as citizen-driven innovation of new services based on open public data.

The Service Design Lab will contribute to the project with its acquired knowledge on citizen participation in innovation processes, co-design and participatory design to create an impact on the way the next generation of public services are conceived. The project will create opportunities to strengthen and expand the Lab research about the use of data in the design process within the area of digitalisation of the public sector. 

See more on the project’s website.

NordicPATH pursues the development of new models for citizen’s participation and a collaborative planning culture in Nordic countries for healthier and people-centered cities. By tackling complex environmental issues such as Air Quality and, subsequently, climate change, it investigates the development of innovative methods targeted for Nordic governance to create smart and sustainable urban solutions with a citizen-oriented approach. Data collected from co-monitoring official stations and citizens’ own measuring devices will constitute the cornerstone for stimulating the co-creation of solutions between citizens, urban planners, authorities and scientists. In this regard, the Service Design Lab will provide methods to engage with citizens and integrate their inputs into inclusive governance planning processes, ensuring high quality and effective cross-sectoral collaboration. 

From workshops or interventions for encouraging the discussion of environmental and urban planning issues, to the description and presentation of the project’s results in conferences or local events, the Service Design Lab will also be in charge of the communication and project dissemination activities. In order to ensure the approach of the scientific findings to the broad range of stakeholders involved, we will work on a holistic communication plan, both online and onsite, and contributing at the same time to the academic community without forgetting a tailored outreach for citizens, urban planners, policymakers and the general public. 

See more on the project’s website.

The WeNet consortium consists of 15 universities worldwide working closely on the development of a new platform for students. The vision is to improve students’ quality of life inside and outside the academic environment by connecting people that can support each other and by leveraging their diversity.

WeNet mission is to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies -designed accordingly with ethical and privacy guidelines- to empower richer and deeper social interactions. To do so, the consortium will run various experiments with students in 18 pilot sites worldwide, involving 10,000 participants.

The solution will be open-source and will support the creation of a new innovation ecosystem by bringing together universities, students, researchers, innovators with established businesses and policymakers.

See more on the project’s website.

MUV – Mobility Urban Values – levers behavior change in local communities using an innovative approach to improve urban mobility: changing commuting habits through a game that mixes digital and physical experiences.

Rather than focus on costly and rapidly ageing urban infrastructures, MUV promotes a shift towards more sustainable and healthy mobility choices by engaging in a positive way local communities, local businesses, policymakers and Open Data enthusiasts.

MUV solutions will be open, co-created with a strong learning community of users and stakeholders, and piloted in a set of diverse urban neighborhoods spread across Europe: Amsterdam (NL), Barcelona (ES), Fundao (PT), Ghent (BE), Helsinki (FI), Palermo (IT).

Mobility and environmental data gathered via the mobile app and the monitoring stations, all released as Open Data, will allow policymakers to enhance planning processes and civic hackers to build new services able to improve cities’ quality of life in a more effective way.

See more on the project’s website.

A project to involve citizens to design new public services based on the use of open data.

The project engages citizens, interest groups, IT experts, public authorities and Start-ups in hackathons, to develop new services based on open data. The results of the hackathons will be developed in new applications and services that will be tested by citizens and possibly developed to a commercial/operative application. The knowledge from the hackathons will also be used to create a European Network of OpenDataLabs, that will become a reference point for citizens to develop new services and initiatives.

Follow the activities of the pilot in Copenhagen on Facebook.