Design for Public-Interest Services: An Emerging Field of Experimentation

Abstract

The first part of this book describes the complex scenario in which the idea of public-interest services originates, by combining the different phenomena of citizen activism, social innovation, new forms of economies and new forms of welfare. This chapter aims to provide a definition of public-interest services (initially, by focusing on the related concept of public interest), building on the framework already depicted and on ideas from the existing literature. The other important contribution of this chapter is the connection between public-interest services and different areas of design: when we speak about design for public-interest services, we consider design for services, participatory design and co-design, which are discussed in detail in Sects. 4.3 and 4.4. The author then attempts to investigate what design can do for public-interest services, and to answer this question more effectively, she introduces the idea of an infrastructure (and a related ‘infrastructuring’ process) to support the emergence, the development and the consolidation of such services. The final paragraph of this chapter is develops this notion of infrastructure by building on the extensive literature related to this concept, and, thus, prepares the ground for further formulation (the idea of a ‘collaborative infrastructure’) that is presented at the end of the book.