Service Design at Aalborg University Copenhagen

Welcome to a K3 seminar with The Service Design group from Aalborg University Copenhagen. At the seminar they will present three EU projects they are currently involved in, they will talk about their Master’s education in Service Design, and they will open for a discussion of possible collaborations with K3. The persons holding the seminar are Amalia de Götzen, Nicola Morelli and Luca Simeone.

It will be held at Wednesday, March 7 at 10.15-12.00 in room NIC 0541 (K3 Open Studio), Niagara.

Below you will find an abstract for the talk as well as short bios of the participants

In this talk we will present the different activities of our research group that only very recently decided to re-define itself as a Lab. We will shortly explain how the group has evolved in the last 6 years and what is the approach we have towards the discipline, taking as a point of departure the core activities we have: the Service Systems Design Master. 

Service design education is still young and it is still interpreted in many different ways, according to the design programs in various universities, where it usually plays a minor role. Very few education schemes provide a complete curriculum on service design and embark on the challenge of equipping a designer who will want to have an important role in providing solutions for people and in supporting new forms of social innovation that happen through new processes both in public and private services.

In our education, we try to map new value-creation processes according to a three level structure, proposing a framework of new competences and tools that are being developed in design education and research. The three levels of “value in use”, “infrastructuring” and  “governance” are also used as a framework to support our research activity, starting from the three Horizon2020 funded projects we are currently working on: Open4Citizens (www.open4citizens.eu), Designscapes (https://www.designscapes.eu/) and Mobility Urban Values (https://www.muv2020.eu/).

Our talk will briefly introduce these three projects, providing us the opportunity to look at how the traditional design approach is nowadays challenged, moving from the idea of a “genius designer” to the one of a designer (and service provider) as actor that ignites and mediates the process of co-creation, supporting the ecosystem for the value creation process.

We will focus then on the proposed multi-level structure, that includes the value-creation level, in which design is a prerogative of the stakeholders participating in the value-creation action; the level of infrastructuring in which designers use their expert knowledge to support the interaction in the value-creation phase; and the level of governance, in which designers must figure out and understand the implications of his/her action on the structure of the ecosystem in which the value-creation process can be adequately organized and possibly scaled-up.

We will conclude our presentation with some of the activities we want to pursue in the future and possible opportunities of collaboration with Malmö University.

Nicola Morelli (PhD) is Professor with Special Responsibility at the AD:MT at AAU. He is now coordinating the EU-H2020-funded Open4Citizens project and part of the research consortium of the EU-H2020-projects MUV and DESIGNSCAPES. In recent years he has been the technical coordinator of the EU-Funded Life 2.0 project and among the main promoters of the new master in Service Systems Design, in Copenhagen.

Amalia de Götzen (PhD) is Associate Professor at the AD:MT at AAU. She graduated in Electronic Engineering at the University of Padova and got a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Verona. Her main research activity includes Service Design, Digital Social Innovation and Interaction Design.

Luca Simeone (PhD) is Assistant Professor at the AD:MT at AAU and his work is situated at the intersection of design practice, research and entrepreneurship. He has founded 6 design companies and has conducted research and teaching activities at universities such as Harvard, MIT and Malmö University.

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