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.

CLIMABOROUGH is an Innovation Action designed to field test the ClimHub, Climate Sandbox and Climate Service concepts within 12 European Cities engaged in their ecological and digital transition. The project aims to enhance traditional urban and spatial planning approaches through data and knowledge based decision making, cross-city and cross-country pilot co-creation as well as the tactical use of public procurement of innovative solutions. 

Selected expected results of the project: (i) building ClimHubs of Cities and solution providers to work on experimentations in real conditions, (ii) harnessing the collective intelligence of local stakeholders for collaborative solution development, (iii) defining Climate Services as a model strategy to use data and visualisation tools for climate transition. 

Based on the lessons learnt and successful concept of the Horizon 2020 Designscapes, CLIMABOROUGH has the ambition to bridge the gap between design and implementation of urban innovations, particularly in the domain of climate change adaptation and mitigation. See more on the project’s website. 

T-Factor is an EU-funded initiative aimed at creating new knowledge, tools, and capabilities to develop the transformative potential of meanwhile spaces in urban regeneration. By meanwhile spaces, the project refers to temporary spaces acting as prototypes of future neighborhoods and areas during an urban regeneration project. The project involves 25 partners including universities, experts, and local communities.

As a project’s partner, the Service Design lab is currently involved in developing a methodological toolbox to address and solve urban challenges in Europe and beyond.
We are also part of the ‘citizen smartness lab’ which intent is to connect human needs with advanced technology and data.

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.

This project will apply our expertise in participatory mapping, data analysis and visualization and digital storytelling, to develop collaborative work with secondary schools and community organisations in Prato, one of the most multiethnic cities in Italy, around the theme of “one city, many cultures”.

The ‘superdiversity’ of the population in many European cities calls for innovative and multidisciplinary practices that directly involve both migrants and the broader community in identifying key benefits, major issues, and effective strategies in dealing with transcultural complexity.

Through a series of  hackathons, the project will produce an opensource, multilayered and interactive digital mapping of Prato, which will provide an original interpretation of the city from the many perspectives of its youth, through geolocalised stories, photographs, artefacts and testimonies produced directly by school students.

This project is a pilot study for a broader study looking at collaborating with culturally diverse communities to develop successful tools for digital storytelling and visualisation.

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.

DESIGNSCAPES is a Coordination Support Action (CSA), coordinated by ANCI Toscana. The project consortium consists of 12 partners from 10 Member States (associations of municipalities, university departments of architecture and design, business schools, service centres, civil society organizations).

The project has the specific mandate to distribute € 1.5 million of its budget in favour of around 50 initiatives at local level in the Member States and associated countries to demonstrate the potential of Design enabled Innovation as an example of innovation in which the involvement of users in the process is central and innovation (applied to services, products, processes, business models, systems and organizations) is more successful thanks to co-creation.

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.