Keywords

1 Introduction

Cities have been transforming by the integration in the urban spaces of digital technologies supporting information and communication exchanges. Of course, this transformation is not only technological, but also social, as the creation of blended spaces of interaction fosters new social uses and behaviors. In details, the expression ‘blended spaces’ has been provided by Benyon [1] who uses it to indicate the urban spaces in which digital and physical elements are integrated one with each other. This blend increases the level of complexity in the spaces and modifies the urban experience of people. In this regard, one of the most challenging topics emerging in academic and non-academic research is the ‘urban interaction design’, an expression which indicates a complex research area focusing on three elements, i.e. urban spaces, people and technologies, whose main objective is investigating how people can interact in a more efficient and effective way in and with an urban environment more and more ‘hybrid’, by focusing on people and their needs [2].

Indeed, any innovative intervention in urban spaces should consider the mutual process occurring between people and technology in socio-technical distributed systems of interaction [3]. In this sense, in order to make cities more livable, the improvement of the user experience became a key element in all the sectors and fields of action regarding the city.

At the same time, the widespread of sharing approaches in private and public life, have been boosted a renewed interest towards the creation and the exploitation of shared public spaces in everyday life for activities that enhance the common good [4].

These two processes are strictly intertwined and lead to the adoption of approaches focusing on the human aspect and the sustainability of the smart city, in our vision a model of city that use smartness, both computer-based and human, to seize opportunities and to effectively and efficiently adapt itself to the needs and contingencies that arise. That means putting together social, cultural, economic, environmental, and technological issues. In effect, in our network society the resolution of problems, but also the management of many daily activities, depends on complexity and on a wider ecosystem of relations and interactions. In this context, the collaboration of all the involved stakeholders, up to the whole society, is needed. The social aspect, increasingly supported by the widespread of new information and communication technologies, especially social networking and mobile technologies and data mining, has been gaining importance in fostering innovation processes and in tackling emerging global challenges. Therefore the ‘social innovation’ term has been assuming a wide range of conceptual variants and its use has been stressed everywhere. Indeed, social innovation can be seen as ‘a potentially powerful force for positive change and a new way of responding to the challenges confronting us’ [5]. According to some of the most popular and convincing definitions, social innovation concerns new ideas (products, services and models) created with the intention of addressing a social need in a positive or beneficial way and that are social in their means and in their ends, as they engage and mobilize beneficiaries and enhance society’s capacity to act [6,7,8].

So, along with the improvement of the personal user experience, another key element for making cities more livable places is the definition of shared goals towards which cities and communities must actively steer, in order to assure equal and accessible-by-everyone benefits for society. The major intervention in this direction are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 [9]. These goals set global challenges, imposing to reflect on the impact that the solutions we design have on a social level and to define clear responsibilities towards the society and the environment. Cities are included among the key points on which to intervene. In detail, the 11th goals concern sustainable cities and communities and around one third of SDGs indicators have an urban component. Although many interventions aiming at adequately fulfilling these ambitious objectives have been already implemented, it is a relatively new and open field for research and experimentation, especially regarding the identification of effective and sustainable tools for intervention.

So, this paper focuses on these two elements: on the one side, the focus on human perspective in urban spaces; on the other side, the need of identifying shared objectives towards cities which consider social, economic and environmental variables. In detail, starting from the identification of the characteristics of the human-centered design and design thinking approaches in urban space, it intends to study the existing connections and the gaps between the social impact evaluation tools and models and the design thinking ones, suggesting that they should be better integrated and organized in the design of user experience in urban spaces from a social innovation perspective.

2 Human-Centered Design Applied to Digital and Social Transformation of Urban Spaces

The starting point of this process is the identification of the main characteristics of the human-centered design approach. Generally, it is based on the active involvement of people we are designing for in creating different kinds of (digital and non-digital) solutions: this action allows not only to consider final users as partners of the design activities, by involving them in participatory processes, but also to find solutions which integrate the emotional and human point of view. These elements increasingly characterize also the design of services and solutions for the urban environment. The aim is to create a more direct relation between citizens and Institutions, in order to improve the mutual trust and increase responsibilities.

According to that, Manzini [10] focuses on the importance to consider design for urban environment not as a prerogative of ‘expert’ designers, but as a process more and more open to ‘non-expert’ people, who can carry out design activities by using their basic and common human skills and abilities. In particular, he gives importance to take into account the point of view of the different stakeholders as a fundamental driver for the identification of effective solutions to the complex problems which characterize the cities.

In fact, the latter can be considered as complex systems, since they consist in a set of different and unpredictable elements, characterized by uncertain links that are not easily recognizable. In this sense, only the application of a human-centered approach, as described above, gives the possibility to consider the different possible facets of a problem and designing solutions which include all the different desires and needs. In effect, an organizational model based on collaboration and communication among different disciplines allows to establish a formative and educational paradigm which, by reducing risks and conflicts, let emerge the best solution, which is not only desirable from the social point of view, but also feasible from the organizational and technical perspective and viable from the economic point of view [11].

One of the most know approaches of the human-centered design is the design thinking [12]. Its peculiarity is that it allows the application of different tools which foster creativity and the continuous reformulation of the problem space (a fundamental element which allows to deal with the complexity of the urban environment), creating an increasing value for people. Moreover, the nature of this approach follows a non-linear path for problem-solving and for the creation of shared value. In fact, if the design thinking consists of the six different stages (listed below), they need to be considered following an iterative path, which requires to continuously return to the same stages in order to evaluate that needs and requirements are opportunely met.

Following, a short description of the six stages of the design thinking. The focus of this section is not providing an exhaustive description of tools and methodologies used in the single stage, but only identifying the general elements which characterize the mentioned approach.

  1. 1.

    Empathize. It consists in identifying behaviors, general approaches, physical and emotional needs of people we are designing for in the specific context in which they live. The value of this stage is to identify non-obvious findings, which allow to define really innovative solution. For this reason, it is important that people are not only observed but also listen and actively engaged.

  2. 2.

    Define. It consists in extracting useful information from the data collected in the previous stage. The output is the identification of the specific problem to face. Different tools and techniques are used in this stage to better focus the problem and to continuously question what has been identified, in order to meet the most significant need.

  3. 3.

    Ideate. It focuses on the idea generation. Creativity and imagination are the basic elements to use in this stage. The general approach is that in the ideation phase no idea should be discarded and people should be left free to share ideas; in fact, the best idea will probably emerge from an optimization of the single shared contributions.

  4. 4.

    Prototype. It consists in building prototypes of the solution, in order to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the interaction, before the implementation. Prototype is a term that can be applied both to digital solution and non-digital ones: its aim is to effectively communicate the project.

  5. 5.

    Test. During this stage specific feedbacks from people who will use the solution will be collected, by encouraging them to interact with the built prototype.

  6. 6.

    Implementation. It consists in the specific development of the designed, realized and tested solution.

During their work experience, the authors of this contribution have carried out many workshops, organized and conducted following the design thinking approach. Most of these workshops have focused on the design for urban environment. Generally, they have been organized considering the following main elements:

  1. 1.

    The focus is around a specific topic. People are encouraged to focus on specific scenarios which describe the main elements which characterize the urban area of interest. This provides participants the possibility to have a description of the urban context to reflect on. In fact, starting from this point, the participants to the workshop are involved in brainstorming and in defining a more specific issue to face;

  2. 2.

    The identification of one persona (or more than one) is realized. Generally, we ask participants to identify the categories of people who live in the specific urban area, by identifying their most common habits, needs, desires and difficulties;

  3. 3.

    The participants are given cards, each of which representing some of the technologies used in the urban environment. These cards represent a useful tool, since it encourages also non-expert participants in defining how specific technologies work. A very important element is that participants are led to think the represented technologies not as proper solutions, but only as tools that need to be combined one with each other in order to imagine more complex and exhaustive services. To do that, participants are generally asked to identify some moments of interaction of target people with the imagined service, in order to imagine the technological solution from the human point of view;

  4. 4.

    The identification of a solution map, which represents the main elements of a concept solution (in particular the objective to reach and the main features of the solution).

The elements above described consist in the main stages of a co-design process aiming to the design of a specific solution for the urban environment, according to the general approach followed by the authors of this contribution. The next steps concern the detailed design of the solution, its implementation and the test with the potential final users, following an iterative approach.

However, without emphasizing these stages, for the aims of this paper, it is fundamental to focus on the fact that, for better highlighting the purpose of making changes in society, it might be useful to strengthen tools and models for evaluating the social impact generated by the designed solutions, already from the beginning of the design cycle. Next section will focus on the tools for social impact evaluation currently available for creating a link with the design thinking methodologies.

3 Social Impact Evaluation Tools and Design Thinking

Nowadays, the chain of events that can be summarized with the expression of ‘digital and social transformation’ have been causing overflowing changes in all sectors of human life. In front of this epochal shift, the social aspect of each human activity has been arising as a crucial parameter for the evaluation of the positive impact produced in a specific context by such activity. So, evaluating the social impacts of projects and human activities, is more and more becoming a required action to gain sustain from the main stakeholders in society, such as Institutions, but also (and more importantly) local civic communities. There are many social impact evaluation tools, each one proposing a specific model for a sustainable development [13, 14]. The aim of this paper is not to evaluate their performance, but to reflect on the role that design thinking and human-centered design tools have within these models.

Some of the most diffused social impact evaluation tools include some tools also applied and very used by the human-centered design. For example, one of the main steps of the SIA (Social Impact Assessment) in measuring the social impact is the identification of the value proposition of the social impact through the theory of change. These tools are generally applied in human-centered design when the aim is to define more in depth the motivations and the objectives of the project.

By the authors’ point of view, social impact evaluation tools present some common approaches regarding the different aspects of a project. The first one is the analysis of the context affected by the project (already existing or proposed) and the kinds of changes that the project aims to bring in it. The second one concerns the management of the project and the evaluation of the effective outputs and outcomes produced by the project. The last one is the financial part, integrated with the social indicators that allow to evaluate the effective social impact of a solution. It is certainly a generalization, but it is useful to identify some points of intervention for human-centered design activities, such as those described into the second section of this paper. In this regard, although also the financial aspect is fundamental for the success of a project by having a central part in defining the success of an idea or project (as shown by the business model canvas method [15]), the other two aspects appear to be closer to the kind of interventions that design thinking and human-centered design usually deal with. In effect, the third one appears to be more distant from the attitude generally attributable to the design methodologies, as it is more like a monitoring approach. However, it can be very useful also in the design process for the definition of KPIs, especially social ones.

In general, the authors of this paper argue that the role of design thinking and human-centered design can be more preeminent when coming to define the social impact of a specific solution or human activity. In the view of creating more interdisciplinary and collaborative frameworks for the definition of more sustainable projects, the creative and generative tools usually applied in design field can gain a larger diffusion also in this instance, i.e. the entrepreneurial field, as demonstrated by some contribution as the Sprint [16] and the Lean design method [17]. At the same time, the interest towards the social impact produced by a project or organization can be extended far beyond the management and business fields. In this sense, until now the focus of social impact evaluation approaches has been more oriented towards social enterprises, than towards a wider range of projects. On the contrary, a greater part of the design process should be oriented towards the definition of the possible social impact produced and the sustainable goals addressed by the project, not only for projects of social development, but for any project locating the person in the center. Although the satisfaction of social needs and the sustainability were key principles in the human-centered design process, there is not a very structured process with specific instruments specifically oriented towards the design of social impact. Or at least, the fragmented landscape of the research on social impact opens new possibilities of intersection with the design thinking approach that should be explored for improving the user experience in urban spaces through social innovation. Some examples can be found in some toolkits used in the field of the design practice that are going to be analyzed in the next section.

4 Design-Centered Tools Oriented Towards the Creation of Social Impact

The design research and the design practice of these last decades have been widely putting a focus on the social aspect of the design, especially referring to the different human-centered approaches. Indeed, according to these methods the capacity of the designed solution of effectively meeting the people’s needs is a fundamental parameter to recognize the success and the goodness of that solution. Moreover, we can observe a widespread rethinking on what is the role of design, as it assumes a strong social connotation [7, 10]. This include also the tools used by designers, and potentially extended to non-expert designers, that are continuously improved through the practice and the collaboration of different actors. In this sense, because of the increasing importance given to the social impacts generated by the design of new solutions, a more structured intervention in order to establish good practices in this direction is needed.

In this paper the authors selected three specific toolkit that are seen as aiming to systematize the instruments for creating a social impact through design: the DIY Toolkit [18], the Digital Social Innovation Toolkit [19] and the Social Impact Design Toolkit [20]. This is not a complete list of toolkits addressed to the design of social impact projects, since here the aim is not to evaluate the single technique or method, but to identify some elements useful for a systematization of social impact tools, in order to apply them in a urban interaction design context.

In general, all these toolkits are open and adaptable to the different needs of designers, that can select methods and activities, and even processes, or letting be inspired by the toolkit.

The DIY Toolkit (Development Impact & You) is a collection of well documented and largely applied tools for inventing, adopting and adapting ideas that can deliver better results, especially in development. It has been selected by the authors of this paper because of its potential in empowering people and stimulating active behaviors. Moreover, it is social in its purpose, as it gathers practical tools to trigger and support social innovation, such as the ‘theory of change’ tool.

The Digital Social Innovation Toolkit refers to open approaches of innovation, such as open hardware, open knowledge, open networks and open data, that develop inspiring digital solutions to social challenges. The toolkit gathers the different experiences (case studies, tool, etc.) in the Digital and Social Innovation landscape arisen from an European project aimed to support new ways of creating social impact in different fields as healthcare, education, democracy, environment, transport and housing. This tool aims to empower people by providing them instruments to create social impact, especially thanks to digital innovations. In detail, it proposes an open design method focusing on collaborative tools to solve societal issues, in order to support the sustainable growth of Digital Social Innovation. So, it goes beyond the mere release of a project and values the benefits derived from the social nature of the open processes and practices implemented for developing the solution.

Lastly, the Social Impact Design (SID) Toolkit is explicitly addressed to the design of solutions aiming at producing a social impact: physical and social changes, any intervention leading to social impacts, and social issues. It gathers several approaches, activities and methods from design thinking, participatory planning and strategic design. The toolkit suggested perspectives and roles to designers and planners encouraged to create positive effects in the urban environment. The aim is to minimize negative social and economic impacts of urban regeneration projects on ‘place’ and ‘people’. In details, it identifies three main phases of the design process: Research Process to Discover Problems, Empathy and Negotiation Based Participation Process, and Solution Based Strategic Design Process. The SID Toolkit is addressed to pre-determine the possible impacts of a project beforehand and to develop design principles to minimize negative effects by applying human centered and participatory processes and by creating models for economic alternatives. Along with the Social Impact Design, other two actions referred to the ‘social impact’ theme are considered, i.e. Social Impact Assessment and Social Impact Programs. In conclusion, the vision at the basis of the SID Toolkit opens to a wide panorama of design interventions, as ‘social impact refers to the changes that results from any intervention in life and physical environment of people’ [20]. For developing social impact design, however, some important actions are required, like redefining the physical and social considerations and approaches of design thinking and developing new methodologies to strengthen empathy between designers and affected people.

5 Conclusions

In this paper the authors made a reflection on the necessity of focusing more in depth on the implementation of social impact evaluation and design tools, by better integrating these two perspectives. In fact, on the one hand the design approaches are generally applied with a focus on user-centered design tools, without considering a more complete identification of the social impacts generated by the designed solutions. While, on the other hand, the focus of social impact evaluation approaches is more oriented towards the social enterprises, than towards a wider range of projects.

However, some good examples regarding the evaluation of social impacts in design can be found both in the principles at the basis of Human-Centered Design and Design Thinking and in some toolkit addressed to social innovators. For instance, approaches aiming at creating a positive social impact refer to the fundamental principle of the Human-Centered Design approaches of taking inspiration by people for developing solutions and generating change on various scales and levels. In details, in this paper the authors analyzed some features of social impact evaluation tools and three design toolkits oriented towards the creation of social impact. Certainly, they are not exhaustive of all work on the topic, but they give important insights for improving user experience in urban spaces through social innovation.

First of all, design approaches aiming at social impacts should in the first place gain in-depth understanding of the dynamics occurring among the different stakeholder of an ecosystem, by fostering an active participation and an open collaboration of all the various actors affected by the impacts generated through a project. Moreover, beside the design process, it is important to consider assessment and planning process, too.

So, in the end, the purpose of this paper is to highlight how it is possible to develop a better user experience in urban spaces starting by the consideration of how the designed solutions can produce positive social, environmental and economic outcomes, how they can reach the identified project’s outputs and finally solve the city needs. In order to reach this objective, it is fundamental to consolidate methods that improve the effectiveness of the solution. For this reason, the research on design needs to strengthen methodologies which, starting from the definition of a specific outcome to reach, identifies the most suitable tools for the measurement of the social, environmental and economic impacts. It includes not only the identification of specific indicators, but also the definition of the metrics for the impact assessment during the realization of the project and after its implementation.

In concluding, this is only the first step of a wider research activity on the topic that would be conducted on the field, by ideating, prototyping and testing methods and tools with designers and the affected people.