Challenges in Designing and Scaling up Community Services

This paper is based on two European Union-funded projects: Life 2.0, which was recently completed, and My Neighbourhood, which is still ongoing. The goal of the former was to create location-based and socially networked services to support elderly people in living independently. The aim of the latter is to develop a platform to activate hidden or latent resources in neighbourhoods. Both of the projects are an application of service design to the public sector and together provide useful insights about designing and scaling up highly localized and personalized services and service platforms. While several analogies can be found between the existing generation of social networking platforms and the services proposed in these projects, there are also several important differences that challenge the way local and individual services should be designed in the perspective of being scaled up to larger contexts.