This research is about the role of service design and ICTs to create and
facilitate the development of a sustainable local community. The notion of a
sustainable community, and to a larger extent, a sustainable society, is
based on a proposition that such a society exists in a form of a distributed
network of local units in which the diversity and the localness of such units
are preserved while innovations are shared.
In a project to develop sustainable food networks in Milan, we aimed at
transforming local producers and consumers into a sustainable community,
i.e., to assign them with the qualities of a sustainable society described
above, through service design approach. Hence a socio-technical
framework to develop strategies that can facilitate such transformation was
developed. The framework consisted of 3 stages: (1) using social network
tools, the existing relations among the users were analyzed in terms of the
structure and the content; (2) based on the analysis, strategies to transform
users into a sustainable community was developed; (3) strategies were fed
back to designing service prototypes and a digital platform. In the paper,
the application of the framework in designing a farmers’ market in Milan is
introduced.
The originality of the framework is in that it supplements the existing
service design process by offering a systematic approach to eliciting the
relational needs of target users and developing service strategies that
address them.
DRS 2012 Bangkok
