Today started the module led by Alessandra Canella that will focus on designing public sector services. There's a growing awareness around the topic of service design for the public sector; governments and public administrations are doing their best to design policies and services that are aligned with the needs of citizens and communities and their raised expectations. The pill will investigate the role of design in the public contexts, in order to provide students with a framework to design, manage and measure the impact of the design process and its outcomes, at the intersection of user experience, innovation, and policy-making. During this module, the teacher will provide a basic theoretical background aimed at covering key concepts, approaches, and tools typically adopted by service designers operating in the public context, reflecting on the peculiarities of public services. The first and probably the most important difference with the private sector is that most of the time, in the public sector people can not choose which service to use: they just have that one with no options.
Students will work in teams to experiment first-hand with the designing of a public service. During the exercises, students will directly apply some of the acquired knowledge to one public service of their choice, focusing on its incremental improvement. To be aligned with other teaching modules, this pill will touch on concepts of co-design, co-creation, and co-production, collaborative services, social innovation, design for policy, inclusive design lightly, as they have been already discussed in other instances. By the end of the module, students will have acquired knowledge of the role that design can play in the public sector and on the innovation toolkit for the public sector. They will have an understanding of the peculiarities of public services and how to address them, through an overview of examples, and the ability to apply what has been introduced in class.
This is the last pill of this edition and our students are ready for the last weeks of didactic activities and, then, for the internship.
