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Design is increasingly used to develop public services, and considerations have arisen regarding how to gain best value from it. Design ladders and design maturity models are commonly also referenced in the public sector, but we argue that their adequate use must rest on an informed view of the diversity of design activities in public-sector organizations. The world's major cities are large and highly diversified organizations. Our inductive case study of one of them, the city of Helsinki, reveals 23 design activities, distinct in terms of the process, outcomes or agency that design has. These activities can be grouped into six different clusters. These lay the ground for each other and support the cultural transformation of the organization into being a more citizen-centric organization. At the same time, they also create a design management challenge and confusion over what 'design' is and what it can do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design is increasingly deployed by governments and cities to address social and policy-related problems and to develop public services and organizations towards more citizen centeredness. Design activities in complex and hierarchic public organizations easily meet challenges, making their impact elusive. More knowledge is needed on the organizational requisites of public sector design. This article provides an empirical analysis of the challenges and opportunities of embedding design in a large public organization, as perceived by fourteen city officials. The case organization, City of Helsinki, has been a pioneer in using design at the strategic level and using it widely in its organization. The results show that differences between the design field and the public sector not only offer complementarities but also create friction in the practical utilization of design. Moreover, the discontinuity and fragmentation of design activities, the highly variable maturity levels within the city organization, the integration of design into projects, and more encompassing leadership, change management, and implementation of the results of design projects were seen as future development areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on organizational change as a co-design challenge. Organizational change is addressed as a human process of relating that takes place in various interactions. This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of what to consider when designers are facilitating co-design for organizational change. We draw from literature on both human-oriented organizational change and co-design. To illustrate how interactions take place in an organizational co-design project, we discuss accounts from a research project that aimed at improving collaborative innovation practices. We highlight that the meanings for change surfaced within organizations and in interaction. We bring to light the in-between space revolving around the two organizations: the facilitator team and the company project team. This temporary in-between space of co-design is facilitated by designers but filled in by participants' engagement and entangled interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Co-creation has been adopted in many recent design and innovation projects, bringing different stakeholders together and creating a shared understanding and new ideas through creative and participative approaches. Despite this increasing popularity, there is still a lack of a systematic understanding of key dimensions and design choices in co-creation projects due to contextual complexity and contingencies. In this paper, we develop the design choices framework for co-creation projects as a result of analyzing 13 co-creation projects from multiple fields, including design research, process innovation and service innovation. The design choices framework provides us with vocabularies that help to explain what kinds of dimensions co-creation projects are built on, what influences the formulation of co-creation projects and what informs the selection and development of methods. The framework also helps to assess and plan co-creation projects. We introduce ten design choices identified from the cross-case analysis and discuss their dynamic interrelations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper portrays crossorganizational collaboration in service networks as a new challenging context for service design. The paper reflects on the role of cross-organizational service networks in a Finnish municipality-initiated research and development project. the project sought to develop new practices for supporting independent living for the elderly involving diverse organizations across public, private and third sectors. The intent was to apply collaborative and customer-centred service development. For this paper, interviews were reviewed from 16 project participants to find out how they perceived cross-organizational collaboration and the role of service design in this project. From these findings, we identified barriers to collaborations that originated in tensions between different organizations and structural and situational barriers that sometimes could be traced to specific mindsets on an organizational level. Based on the insights from these interviews, we explain how service design may contribute to enhancing collaborative developments within and across cross-organizational service networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a workshop process to enhance the learning of employee-driven innovating (LEDI) and to evaluate in multiple ways the practical effects of the LEDI process, which aimed to enhance the employee-driven innovation practices at workplace level in a public organisation. Although front-line employees are increasingly encouraged to participate in innovation, organisations lack multi-level knowledge on the practices, outcomes and effects of participation. Design/methodology/approach – A six-month development process (LEDI) was conducted to empower front-line hospital support service workers to learn to innovate and to apply this in the services they provide. The process consisted of different themes: future visions, current services, creating new services and evaluations of ideas and innovation embryos. The multi-method evaluation of the process included pre-evaluation of the generated innovation ideas, a developmental evaluation of the selected innovation embryos, a follow-up evaluation of the innovation ideas and an evaluation of the organisational level effect via a quantitative survey. Findings – The intervention process had positive effects on employee participation and learning to innovate. The conclusion of the four evaluations is that the LEDI process developed a new kind of agency among employees and enabled significant improvements to services. The evaluation of the organisation-level effect revealed that the process had also improved the views regarding preconditions for development. Originality/value – The intervention method is a practical application of employee-driven innovation conception that is validated as practical and effective at workplace level. The process is a viable method for enhancing workers’ innovation-related learning in service organisations. The novelty of the method is based on the multi-disciplinary combination of approaches that consist of theories of practice-based innovation, expansive learning and emphatic human-centred service design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing interest in engaging users and other partners in collaborative design has led to an increase in the number of methods for organising collaboration. The aim of these methods is to support collaborative explorations of future opportunities in inspiring atmospheres. In this discourse, design games have become a popular concept that has been widely adopted to describe various design activities, which at first glance do not necessarily share many qualities. This paper aims to provide further understanding about the purposes that design games serve in codesign. The main contribution of the paper is the introduction of a play framework that highlights three perspectives on how design games appear to different people experiencing them: as a tool, as a mindset and as a structure. To clarify the components of design games, the paper reflects on the relations between design and games, the two parts of the concept ‘design games’, and two further qualities embedded in games: play and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, we will introduce a co-design method called Storytelling Group that has been developed and tested in three service design cases. Storytelling Group combines collaborative scenario building and focus group discussions. It inspires service design by providing different types of user information: a fictive story of a customer journey is created to illustrate a ‘what if’ world, users tell real-life stories about their service experiences, users come up with new service ideas, and they are also asked about their opinions and attitudes in a focus-group type of discussion. The method was developed for service design cases where a longer time perspective has an important role. Moreover, the method is a quick start for actual design work but still includes users in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User-centred design is a widely acknowledged practice. Much attention has been paid to the methods, tools and processes on how to conduct design research and field studies with and about ‘users’ and existing or possible ‘contexts of use’. The underlying driver is that the design team will be better at designing if they have an empathic understanding of the people to design with and for. Currently, more effort is invested in engaging various stakeholders in collaborative design activities that nurture an attitude of human-centredness as a strategy. Empathic design approaches are essential in such strategies as they value subjective and experiential perspectives in design. The objective of this paper is to illustrate and discuss different kinds of formats that can be used to work with representations of field research findings and insights in ways that can be open-ended. Being open-ended means that they can allow and inspire new individual interpretations for various participants in the collaborative design processes, which include users, designers and other stakeholders. What is argued for here is the value of incompleteness of field study outcomes as it invites sense-making through making new interpretations which lead to empathic understanding and engagement. Rather than communicating the final results, design in supporting collaboration is applied in a process of exploring what it is that will create value for specific people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designers are facing new kinds of design tasks beyond their traditional expertise that call for tools and practices to facilitate design collaboration. This article focuses on the relations between probing and issues of collaboration and participation. It first introduces the probes approach and then describes how it has been applied to support collaboration and participation in case studies which have been conducted in the context of design research and company collaboration in Finland. The article also discusses the role of probing in enhancing collaboration. It proposes that the probes approach can have roles in supporting an iterative co-exploring of the design space, as well as in facilitating collaboration with various stakeholders in co-design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we describe a design study on how families in Los Angeles experience nature, with a particular focus on how using alternative formats for research analysis and presentation can enrich a design research inquiry. Conducted in Pasadena, CA as a part of Super Studio, the year-long design research class emphasized knowledge building and sharing through design methods of analysis, exhibition, and concept prototypes. After conducting interviews and engaging participants with probes, the class built the results into an open-ended knowledge environment. The main observation from the exhibition – that Angelenos have a limited vocabulary for describing nature and their interaction with it – helped to define the opportunity for design intervention that created connection points between Angelenos and nature. There are few attempts to describe how probe returns evolve into design concepts. Showcased is a process that depends on the unique affordances of design as the vehicle for discovery and invention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In user-centered design, attention has shifted from improving usability and addressing ergonomic problems to wider perspectives such as experiences in everyday life. This shift has forced user-centered practitioners to evaluate and develop tools for finding new means of understanding user experience for design. Visual, playful and open-ended probes have raised fresh interest in the design community. In order to create a deeper understanding of this approach, this paper presents the fundamental qualities of probes and, based on empirical data and literature, describes four reasons for applying them in the product development and concept design context: for inspiration, for information, for participation and for dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]