Creative Citizens

A fab-lab of collaborative services

Promoters
Politecnico di Milano, Dottorato di Ricerca in Design, Dipartimento di Design, Polimi DESIS Lab.

Partners
Cascina Cuccagna, Nutrire Milano.

Sponsorship
Consiglio di Zona 4 – Milano

Keywords
Service design | Co-design | Co-production | Social innovation | Empowering citizens

Website
Creative Citizens
Cittadini Creativi Facebook Page
Cascina Cuccagna
Design Department | Politecnico di Milano
Phd Design Polimi

Context
The Creative Citizens project originated as a result of the Ph.D. research conducted by Daniela Selloni at the Politecnico di Milano, within the Polimi DESIS Lab, in the field of service design and design for social innovation.

This experimentation results from a renewed activism on the part of city dwellers, which can be currently observed in the city of Milan. Confronted with a lack of services inside the city, what is now happening is that local communities are seeking to solve the problem from the bottom up, in unprecedented ways, aiming at improving the quality of their urban life and determine the identity of the spaces they live in. Hence, Creative Citizens project represents an attempt to carry out research outside universities, in direct contact with the city and its residents and to attract and include members of society.
The experimentation took place in a space that symbolizes Milanese activism, the Cascina Cuccagna, one of the sixty farmhouses owned by the Municipality of Milan, situated right outside the former city walls, in the Zone 4 neighbourhood. Cascina Cuccagna aims to become a permanent laboratory for civic participation and a new public space that will welcome and support the creativity of individuals, groups and associations by offering spaces, equipment and collaboration. Currently, the farmhouse is undergoing a transformation and is organizing residency opportunities for original projects with the same mission.

Creative Citizens responded to the call for the assignment of temporary spaces in the Cascina, presenting a program focusing on participatory design between designers and local communities by using the tools of service design research.
Creative Citizens has brought the expertise of researchers to the service of ordinary people in Cascina Cuccagna, creating a laboratory of solutions for daily life, improving existing services and designing new ones, acting as a semi-public office for service design and connecting citizens with designers, stakeholders and institutions. In other words, creating a good environment for co-designing social innovation.

Concept
Creative Citizens builds upon the idea of creating a meeting space among citizens, designers, institutions and local stakeholders, a container to co-design and co-produce services for daily life in the neighbourhood (Zone 4). The project aims to develop a new format of intervention and collaboration in our cities, a dedicated entity to support co-design activities, which can be defined as a fab-lab of services. In this place, citizens are veritable service-thinkers and service-makers, because they literally produce the services they need themselves, in a hybrid area in between public and private, market and society, amateur and professional, profit and no-profit.

Strategy
The strategy is composed by a combination of different research actions, aiming at engaging and empowering people, within a programme of 12 co-design sessions. Each session is characterized by a temporary set design to simulate service situations in order to test or modify them, using methodologies and tools coming from service design research.

Activities
An ongoing experimentation involving a community of thirty citizens with weekly meetings began in February 2013, continuing until the end of June 2013. The project consisted of a series of co-design sessions dealing with four different service areas: sharing networks, bureaucratic advice, food systems and cultural activities, all of which were connected to simple daily tasks and to existing services and places, such as time banks, purchasing groups, local shops, museums, markets and fairs. The programme of co-design sessions was intended as a simple path of creative participation, precisely because everyone was able to become a designer of his daily life, at least for a few months, while having fun at the same time.
The four service areas were organized in four cycles, each of them consisting of three creative sessions, which can be seen as three consequential steps. The starting meeting was a warm up session, to familiarize with the topic by presenting good practices from all over the world. It aimed to inspire people and bring visions of possible daily life. Participants selected the most promising elements of the presented cases, to be combined in the second session, in order to create as advanced a service concept as possible. This second meeting was a generative session, a sort of collective brainstorming bringing together citizens’ desires and good practice insights. In the third session, the objective was to move from an ideal service to a real one, identifying the resources that could be involved in the development of the service. It was a real prototyping session, using physical mock-ups to shape a service truly suitable for the area in question i.e. Zone 4.

Development
The experimentation phase lasted until the end of June 2013: the final step was a public presentation of the results, involving representatives of the neighbourhood and of the Municipality.
The Creative Citizens project is undergoing now an implementation phase into two main perspectives:
• deepening the format of intervention: focusing on the model of “fab-lab of services”, defining functions, roles, stakeholders and related business model;
• defining possible evolutions for the co-designed services: envisaging a possible intersection with the public sector (enhancing new forms of second welfare) or with the private sector (leading to the birth of new social enterprises).

Results
The final result of Creative Citizens is a collection of 6 everyday services co-designed with the active participation of people. They are 6 ready-to-use solutions for the Zone 4.

Theme 1: Services for exchanging goods and skills

1. Augmented Time Bank: a system to exchange skills and small tasks, within both condominium blocks and the neighbourhood, starting from Cuccagna Time Bank.
2. Object Library: a physical and digital space for bartering, borrowing, gifting, and renting goods in the neighbourhood.

Theme 2: Legal and bureaucratic services

3. Citizen’s Desk: a service for orientation and bureaucratic first aid, in various domains: legal, fiscal and architectural/building advice.

Theme 3: Food services

4. Facecook: a neighbourhood food network connecting restaurants, markets, shops and local residents.
5. Local Distribution System: an alternative distribution network to connect Zone 4 with the Agricultural Park South Milan area, based on the principles of disintermediation and participated logistics.

Theme 4: Cultural services

6. Zona 4 Ciceros: places in Zone 4 adopted and explained by a citizen-guide, organizing unconventional tours to discover hidden or forgotten places.

Other results
• A framework describing and explaining how design activism combined with service design could provide one possible answer to the services’ deficit in times of crisis.
• A focus on the role of the designer: within this process, the designer is not a facilitator, is a real leader, a connections-keeper, a vision-bringer.
• A rough set of co-design suggestions to facilitate the shift from engaging to empowering people.
• A reference case: Creative Citizens is generating interest in national and international context.

General public (on-going):
The Creative Citizens project is communicated essentially through 3 websites: cittadinicreativi.it – facebook.com/cittadinicreativi – cuccagna.org.
Additional communication is developed through the twitter account and the blog – microsuper.it – curated by the researcher Daniela Selloni.
Articles about the project were published on several newspapers and on-line magazines. Furthermore, an important contribution comes from participating at exhibitions and events, for example during Milan Design Week 2013 (Good Design at Cascina Cuccagna), within the project “Milano e oltre . Una visione in movimento” (at Triennale di Milano) and within the event “Sharitaly” (at Università Cattolica del sacro Cuore and Palazzo delle Stelline).
The dissemination phase is still ongoing in both contexts.

Tools
The methodology used within the experiments is a set of combined participatory techniques, including co-design and community-centred design as already discussed. The research context and language is informal and thus quite different from the academic one. It requires a specific adaptation of methods and tools, making them more appealing and easily understandable for ordinary people (all the citizens participating to the meetings).

For each session, several tools were designed with three main purposes:
• inspiring tools, to spark off or reveal unexpected ways of doing things (good practices boards, suggestion cards, video-stories);
• framing tools, to elaborate a shared way of doing a specific thing (system maps, customer journey maps, front office and back office displays) ;
implementing tools, to introduce a model into a local context, involving real players (service mock ups, localization maps, role games and stakeholders maps). All the tools were specifically conceived for each co-design session, self-produced by researchers, sometimes adapting traditional research tools (as case studies), sometimes creating new ones (as suggestion cards and localization maps).
Most of the tools can be downloaded from the cittadinicreativi.it website, because one of the main purposes is also to create a platform of co-design tools as opened as possible.

Bibliography
The dissemination phase is carried out within two different contexts: the scientific and academic one and another connected to the general public.

Scientific dissemination (on-going):
• Selloni D. (2013). The experience of Creative Citizens. Touchpoint – The Journal of Service Design. Vol. 5, N. 2. Designing Citizen-Centred Public Services. Service Design Network.

• Selloni D., Cantù D., (2013). From engaging to empowering: a set of co-design experiments with a service design perspective. Conference Social Frontiers: the next edge of social innovation research. London, NESTA.
A number of lectures about the project were held at Parsons School of Design, in New York City, and in Milan at Politecnico di Milano and Università Cattolica del sacro Cuore.