Luca Simeone

In an increasingly complex and rapidly evolving world, Futures Thinking: Using a Multidisciplinary Approach offers an essential guide for navigating the uncertainty of our times. This book integrates the rigour of traditional social research methodologies, the precision of data science, and the visionary insights of foresight, alongside the inclusive principles of participatory design. Essential methods, such as horizon scanning, scenario building, and trend analysis, are presented, highlighting how these can help governments, organizations, and individuals navigate uncertainty. The importance of imagining possible and plausible futures to inform present decisions is discussed, along with how futures thinking fosters strategic innovation. By equipping readers with the tools to interpret and imagine diverse future trajectories, it demonstrates how combining data analysis, strategic foresight, and community engagement can drive sustainable, inclusive solutions. Presenting a new and deeply researched methodology, the book encourages readers to adopt a long-term mindset, essential for addressing the challenges of today and tomorrow. Expert contributors from industry, academia, government, and NGOs—including Jim Dator, Jeanette Kwek, Sohail Inayatullah and his digital twin, Joice Preira, and Anne-Katrin Bock—enhance this essential guide to navigating uncertainty through their futures thinking expertise. Aimed at professionals, managers, academics, and curious minds alike, this book fosters a collaborative and holistic approach to shaping desirable futures.

In an increasingly complex and rapidly evolving world, Futures Thinking: Using a Multidisciplinary Approach offers an essential guide for navigating the uncertainty of our times. This book integrates the rigour of traditional social research methodologies, the precision of data science, and the visionary insights of foresight, alongside the inclusive principles of participatory design. Essential methods, such as horizon scanning, scenario building, and trend analysis, are presented, highlighting how these can help governments, organizations, and individuals navigate uncertainty. The importance of imagining possible and plausible futures to inform present decisions is discussed, along with how futures thinking fosters strategic innovation. By equipping readers with the tools to interpret and imagine diverse future trajectories, it demonstrates how combining data analysis, strategic foresight, and community engagement can drive sustainable, inclusive solutions. Presenting a new and deeply researched methodology, the book encourages readers to adopt a long-term mindset, essential for addressing the challenges of today and tomorrow. Expert contributors from industry, academia, government, and NGOs—including Jim Dator, Jeanette Kwek, Sohail Inayatullah and his digital twin, Joice Preira, and Anne-Katrin Bock—enhance this essential guide to navigating uncertainty through their futures thinking expertise. Aimed at professionals, managers, academics, and curious minds alike, this book fosters a collaborative and holistic approach to shaping desirable futures.

This open access book discusses service design capabilities in innovation processes, and provides a framework that guides design students, practitioners and researchers towards a better understanding of operational aspects of service design processes. More specifically, it revisits service designers’ capabilities in light of the new roles that have opened up in innovation processes on different scales.After years of being inadequately defined, the professional profile of service designers is now taking shape. Today private and public institutions recognize service designers as essential contributors to their innovation and development processes. What are the capabilities that characterize a service designer? These essential capabilities are what service designers should acquire in their education and can sell when looking for a job.

This open access book discusses service design capabilities in innovation processes, and provides a framework that guides design students, practitioners and researchers towards a better understanding of operational aspects of service design processes. More specifically, it revisits service designers’ capabilities in light of the new roles that have opened up in innovation processes on different scales.After years of being inadequately defined, the professional profile of service designers is now taking shape. Today private and public institutions recognize service designers as essential contributors to their innovation and development processes. What are the capabilities that characterize a service designer? These essential capabilities are what service designers should acquire in their education and can sell when looking for a job.

This study investigates the relation between the design activity and entrepreneurial ambition of three academic labs: MIT Senseable City Lab, metaLAB (at) Harvard, and Medea at Malmö University. These labs are positioned at the borderland of academic research, as they operate in connection with external stakeholders (industry, NGOs, government institutions) through, for example, joint strategies of intellectual property management or the creation of start-ups. Various economic and social factors motivate the development of these collaborative spaces including the need for academia to secure alternative sources of funding and the political ambition to incorporate knowledge production into the existing value circuits of the market economy. In these spaces, stakeholders with varying interests, agendas, and power positions interact through what can be conflictual and tense processes. Through the combination of ethnographically inspired methods and a semiotic interpretative framework, the study explores how design practice contributes to value creation in entrepreneurial academic labs. It also focuses on the translation aspect of academic entrepreneurship as emerging from the interrelation of varying and transversal design moves and modes. Spatially dislocated and materially re-articulated within different contexts, the format of the lab actualizes diverse interpretative directions and shifts in meaning relating to multiple stakeholders at certain moments in time. While some moves were pulled toward a linear development process by logic aimed at creating products to be commercialized or publicly showcased, other design moves aimed to preserve complexity and redundancy and retained a high level of openness to external contributions. To varying extents, the three labs also activated and sustained the more ambiguous aspects of design as a translational practice. In a sense, these three academic labs exemplify in-between spaces that, within the context of the design projects studied, articulate a type of translational entrepreneurship which allows multiple stakeholders to retain their divergences while simultaneously building upon their convergences in coordinated action. This translation activity traveled nonlinear routes but was firmly anchored to what was found to be asymmetrical power dynamics and negotiation as well as certain alliances and actively sustained ambiguity.

This book investigates novel methods and technologies for the collection, analysis and representation of real-time user-generated data at the urban scale in order to explore potential scenarios for more participatory design, planning and management processes. For this purpose, the authors present a set of experiments conducted in collaboration with urban stakeholders at various levels (including citizens, city administrators, urban planners, local industries and NGOs) in Milan and New York in 2012. It is examined whether geo-tagged and user-generated content can be of value in the creation of meaningful, real-time indicators of urban quality, as it is perceived and communicated by the citizens. The meanings that people attach to places are also explored to discover what such an urban semantic layer looks like and how it unfolds over time. As a conclusion, recommendations are proposed for the exploitation of user-generated content in order to answer hitherto unsolved urban questions. Readers will find in this book a fascinating exploration of techniques for mining the social web that can be applied to procure user-generated content as a means of investigating urban dynamics.