In the past decades, industrial design practice and research have focused extensively on how to optimize production and consumption, as a way to prevent negative environmental impacts, such as resource depletion, pollution, and excessive waste. Recently, the “circular economy” concept is increasingly used to achieve environmental benefits and economic growth simultaneously. Industrial design can contribute to a circular economy by fostering systems changes to achieve durability, optimal reuse, refurbishment, remanufacturing, and recycling of products and materials. Indeed, researchers have examined both the theoretical and practical aspects of how design knowledge can support the transition to a circular economy. However, this body of knowledge has not been systematically analyzed yet. To address this critical gap, this paper poses the following question: How has industrial design research so far contributed to advancing the circular economy knowledge? Accordingly, we survey relevant design literature focusing on the circular economy, through a review of contributions published in 42 scientific journals. Based on our results, we discuss how industrial design practices can potentially contribute to a circular economy across four thematic areas: (1) design for circular production processes, (2) design for circular consumption, (3) design to support policy towards the circular economy, and (4) design education for the circular economy.

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The focus of design studies has shifted from a product-centric perspective to a perspective in which value is defined by and co-created with the consumer, rather than embedded in the output. The reasoning hence focuses on the interplay between innovation and design processes. Moving from an earlier conceptualization of design-driven innovation, the attempt is to define the space of interaction between the different components of the innovation process. In this way a 3D innovation space can be sketched where different practices and experiences can be mapped. Through this exercise the key hypothesis of this work is empowered: no innovation is possible without design.@en

This paper investigates the opportunities of leveraging a hackathon format to empower citizens by increasing their abilities to use open data to improve their neighbourhoods and communities. The presented discussion is grounded in five civic hackathon case studies organised in five European cities. The research revealed specialised learning and collaborative alignment as two mutually complementary aspects of the involved learning processes, which were achieved with the help of high-fidelity and low-fidelity prototypes, respectively. Consequently, the paper identifies and discusses three main factors required to sustain social learning ecosystems beyond hackathon events, and with the purpose of democratising smart city services. These factors include a) supporting individuals in obtaining specific expert knowledge and skills, b) nurturing data- literate activist communities of practice made up of citizens with complementary expert skillsets, and c) enabling members of these communities to generate prototypes of open-data services of varying fidelity. @en

Along with the urgent need to reinvent our society, a series of paradigm shifts are already shaping transitions toward a more participatory and digital society. The current work takes stock of the promise of open data as a new resource and elaborates upon the maker movement, which has spurred people’s capacity to participate and has provided tools and infrastructures to unleash people’s intrinsic ability to create and innovate. We explore how open data can be a new commons, discuss how hackathons can support digital citizenship, and reflect on the role of Transition Design in creating ecosystems around the common resource and in building capacity@en

Digital data has a considerable role in our everyday lives: we use publicly available data to find out about weather, traffic or pollution, we track ourselves and we release our private data to monitor our health and to get advices from our favourite apps, we relate on services that digest big amount of data to predict what will happen next. In this era of “living services”, what kind of data literacy is needed to equip a service designer? Is there a need to rethink of service design tools so that data will be explicitly taken into account in the design process? Is there a need to update service design curricula to embrace these challenges? All of these questions will be discussed through a specific case: a workshop on data exploration held at the Service Systems Design Master at Aalborg University in Copenhagen to investigate the role of data literacy in a service design university program.@en

An increasing computing capability is raising the opportunities to use a large amount of publicly available data for creating new applications and a new generation of public services.

But while it is easy to find some early examples of services concerning control systems (e.g. traffic, meteo, telecommunication) and commercial applications (e.g. profiling systems), few examples are instead available about the use of data as a new resource for empowering citizens, i.e. supporting citizens’ decisions about everyday life, political choices, organization of their movements, information about social, cultural and environmental opportunities around them and government choices. Developing spaces for enabling citizens to harness the opportunities coming from the use of this new resource, offers thus a substantial promise of social innovation.

This means that open data is virtually a new resource that could become a new commons with the engagement of interested and active communities. The condition for open data becoming a new commons is that citizens become aware of the potential of this resource, that they use it for creating new services and that new practices and infrastructures are defined, that would support the use of such resource.
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In the recent years, new forms of organization have emerged, that have a disruptive power over the existing social and economic system. This phenomenon is challenging the traditional design approach, based on the idea that designers could design services for citizens and public administrations. In the new processes designers and service provider are simply mediating the process of co-creation and supporting the ecosystem for the value creation process. This paper will propose a logical framework for the design action, according to a 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 the structure of the ecosystem in which the value-creation process can be adequately organized and possibly scaled-up.@en