Design Competences to Support Participatory Public Services

This paper is an early investigation of a PhD-study that started in February 2017. The paper identifies challenges emerging from a gap between citizens’ needs and public offering to address such needs. Citizens often organize themselves when public administrations are unable to provide valid answers to unsolved and shared everyday problems. In this context designers should support and facilitate bottom up approaches that could address these challenges by the creation of new public services that are informed by the real needs of their users (the citizens). How can designers support the spontaneous creations of services by citizens? How might designers build platforms that could support interactions between citizens and public organizations on a large scale? In this paper I will refer to the Open4Citizens (O4C) research project as an exemplary playground to build co-design tools that supports the designer activity to empower the citizens to build meaningful services.