Francesca Rizzo

• Communication science
• Professor (Associate) at Politecnico di Milano

This chapter explores the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in public participation, spanning from supportive to autonomous roles within the framework of e-participation. It delineates this progression elaborating a three-stage model in which AI acts as an Assistant, Guide, and Governor. Each stage is examined exploring relevant cases from the l...

This chapter identifies design thinking practices for supporting e-participation. The chapter presents the five practices of (i) Meaning creation and sense-making, (ii) Publics formation, (iii) Co-production, (iv) Experimenting and prototyping, and (v) Changing organisational culture. Each of these practices is discussed against relevant case studi...

This chapter provides an overview of e-participation, tracing its evolution from early public involvement initiatives to its current integration with digital technologies. It provides examples of implementations and highlights both the potential and challenges of e-participation practices and platforms. The cases are used to discuss the strategic i...

This chapter delves into the theoretical foundations of Design Thinking (DT) for public sector innovation, highlighting its capacity to impact organisational culture, strategic innovation, and operational processes. Emphasising a user-centric approach, the chapter explores how DT principles like abductive reasoning, prototyping, and co-design can t...

This chapter examines the application of design thinking in enhancing e-participation by aligning DT practices with identified barriers to participation. The chapter discusses practical strategies for leveraging DT to address issues such as digital illiteracy and lack of engagement, providing a framework for implementing more effective and inclusiv...

This chapter explores the theoretical underpinnings of e-participation within e-governance and the critical role of ICTs in facilitating public engagement across governmental levels. It highlights the transformation of e-participation from internal functions to inclusive policy-making processes, supported by ICTs to promote participatory, deliberat...

This chapter explores areas for future research that extend beyond the scope of the current investigation, looking at the role of DT as a transformative approach for enhancing e-participation. Ultimately, it summarises how the work contributes to the current discourse.

In the previous chapters, over one thousand indicators for assessing the social innovation component of cities action plans have been presented, according to defined categories. The practical and theoretical implications of such catalogue of indicators are discussed, firstly providing concrete steps and checklists for deploying indicators in city b...

For each of the ten categories of the social innovation component of an action plan (SIAP), a set of indicators is developed which can be utilized by the public administration to monitor implementation and outcome of social innovation actions at urban level.

The complex and urgent challenge of reaching carbon neutrality requires systemic changes of our current systems. Starting from the acknowledgment that technological solutions alone are not enough to reach climate neutrality at the required speed, social innovation becomes a crucial lever for accelerating systemic transformation. Several projects an...

How can cities’ public administrators, policy makers or transition teams be supported in selecting and monitoring social innovation actions that support people-centred systemic solutions to reduce carbon emissions? Including social innovation in cities’ climate city contracts and action plans, requires decision makers to consider the impact logic a...

Social Innovation (SI) is considered a key lever for supporting climate action and decarbonization. In addition to the adoption of technological innovations, novel social practices can lead to the reconfiguration of socio-technical systems toward more democratic energy transitions and heightened civic participation for climate action. Several frame...

Pilot projects and experimentations, especially when conducted in restricted contexts, require assessment activities in order to determine not only their success or failure, but also to identify potential for replication, best practices and obstacles to be tackled in the future. In addition to this, monitoring and assessment have been a pressing is...

The intersection and permeability of science, innovation and society result in a series of benefits and challenges, underlying the important role the latter can and should play.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has emerged in recent years, in Europe and across the world, as a model of scientific and technological advancement that is the result of the cooperation of actors that traditionally worked in an autonomous way. Advanced perspectives on RRI suggest how knowledge and solutions should be co-produced by divers...

Design has emerged as a discipline equipped to tackle the complex problems of the 21st century, primarily for its human-centered and experimentation approach and participative qualities. Through the discussion of a case study of a government design lab, formerly inside the Finnish Immigration Service, the question of how design can help public sect...

The innovation demand placed on both profit-driven and mission-driven organisations is steadily rising in the face of changing technological and social paradigms, set against a generalised atmosphere of fiscal austerity. Hence, mission-driven organisations have undergone a series of transformations in order to find new revenue streams and to better...

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has emerged in recent years, in Europe and across the world, as a model of scientific and technological advancement that is the result of the cooperation of actors that traditionally worked in an autonomous way. Advanced perspectives on RRI suggest how knowledge and solutions should be co-produced by divers...

Increasing attention is being paid towards the potential of social innovation (SI) in responding to society’s greatest challenges. While measures have been taken to support the flourishing of these innovations, they have thus far been made on ideal models of development, misaligned with what occurs in reality. This has led to the creation of suppor...

The concept of 'design culture' is a new and important idea within academic design. But what is this emergent discipline? Why does it matter? Featuring an impressive range of international case studies, Design Culture looks at everything from the function of a Danish clothing company and the evolution of New Zealand's resource-based economy to the...

This chapter contributes to the discussion on social entrepreneurship by analysing the hybridity of social innovation business models. In response to the call for more precise delimitations between various concepts, the following section differentiates «social enterprise» from «social entrepreneurship». Section 4.3 discusses the key factors trigger...

The current Cultural Heritage management system lacks of ICT platforms for the management and integration of heterogeneous and fragmented data sources and interconnection between private and public subjects involved in the process. The SACHER project intends to fill this gap, working both on a technological level and on a business model level: firs...

Restoration is becoming a quite complex process: a large number of internal and external variables co-exist and may impair it. Among these, the large number of professionals involved and the huge amount of documentation produced can heavily affect the quality of the intervention as well as the possibility to have systemic and informed interventions...

The labour markets and European societies as a whole are subject to constant change. One way to face these challenges is the application of “entrepreneurial skills” such as self-motivation, time management etc. The authors give examples of entrepreneurship in the elds of digitaliza- tion, social innovation, and eco-innovation and present special gr...

Design Thinking (DT) is becoming a mantra in the different areas of innovation: including SI and Public sector (Manzini&Rizzo, 2011; Deserti&Rizzo, 2015). But despite its large success in literature, DT is still applied in peripheral areas of Public sector where it is in place as methodology to conduct research and innovation pilots. The article f...

Purpose - The chapter provides empirical research results on the peculiarities of social innovation and the specific features that its business model must support. It concludes by proposing a Social Innovation Business Model Canvas and steps towards Social Innovation typologies. Methodology/approach - The research is based on the results of a compa...

This easy to read booklet provides insights into SIMPACT's main findings, 1. The Economic Dimensions of SI 2. Towards a Typology of SI 3. Towards Sustainable SI Business Models 4. A Conducive Environment for SI - Regional Innovation Ecosystem 5. Spread and Diffusion of SI 6. How Policy can Stimulate, Resource and Sustain SI 7. Measuring SI - Tool...

Societies and cities are living in times of deep cultural changes. Design of course has sought to tackle city societal problems in the past, but this has largely been confined to design activism (and to the political sphere of the design action). Its main aim has been to raise awareness of specific problems and/or demonstrate dissent with mainstrea...

Thus far, many contributions in the field of design have described design's role in the life cycle of a successful Social Innovation (SI). Design, in fact, has been proposed by many authors to be the most suitable approach to developing SI initiatives from their start-­‐up to release. In particular, some authors have proposed Design Thinking as the...

Attraverso la raccolta dei contributi del gruppo di ricerca raccolto attorno allo Humanities Design Lab del Politecnico di Milano, il testo propone una riflessione sulla relazione tra design e scienze umane e sociali. L’intento è quello di mettere a confronto - attraverso brevi ma incisivi interventi - portatori di saperi diversi per individuare am...

The Smart City is by now a model for the application of Future Internet services and infrastructure towards radical improvements of urban services in terms of efficiency and sustainability. In recent experiences in this area, however, a new vision is emerging that enriches the original concept with the human perspective, as gained through the appli...

Within the most recent discussion on smart cities and the way this vision is affecting urban changes and dynamics, this book explores the interplay between planning and design both at the level of the design and planning domains’ theories and practices. Urban transformation is widely recognized as a complex phenomenon, rich in uncertainty. It is th...

Cities are facing disruptive challenges today. All these require smarter solutions and are creating pressure for the public and private sector to deliver innovative services and great expectations are put in the new Smart City paradigm. Most of these solutions keep technologies out of the urban environments, far from being considered components of...

The large spreading of e-democracy and e-participatory tools and environments showed, and is still showing, that technologies offer new direction for dealing with the challenge of scaling the deliberative democracy perspective up to the urban governance scale [24] [37]. The recent growth of Urban Living Labs and Human Smart City initiatives is disc...

This paper presents current trends in service design research concerning large scale projects aimed at generating changes at a local scale. The strategy adopted to achieve this, is to co-design solutions including future users in the development process, prototyping and testing system of products and services before their actual implementation. On...

Purpose – The proposed paper discusses the role of public institutions in fostering innovation of public services, focussing on the emergent nature of innovation. In particular it analyses the opportunity for urban administrations to play the role of “growers” (i.e. “capturers, ”, drivers and facilitators) of scaling-up processes, of urban forces s...

This paper examines the need for large-scale, sustainable changes, and the effects of citizens' active participation and design co-operating to realise such changes. Section 1, starting from Pelle Ehn's last contribution, deals with participatory design and how it can be extended from the traditional idea of participation as the integration of user...

The workshop proposed aims at reflecting on the practice of co-designing scenarios to develop digital services. The contents providing the basis to the foreseen activities regards the on-going European project Life 2.0 on the topic of the development of geographical positioning services to support independent living and social interaction of elderl...

In this paper, the key ideas of ambient intelligence, wearable objects and service-oriented computing are combined so that appliances and devices can disappear and become part of the work garments and environment of the individual and, as an effect, services emerge to face risky situations through reaction to alarms and to perform risk management....

How to design and manage products, services and experiences that are to be completed and built upon by users or customers? How can we design for co-designers? This workshop will bring together examples and studies of recent trends in user generated content, open platforms for exchange of products, ideas and media, end user customization and other o...

Given the emergent need for usability, during last year's traditional development processes have been extended for enabling the fulfillment of usability requirements. Usability Evaluation Methods (UEMs) have been therefore proposed at any stage of the development process, to verify the usability of incremental design artifacts, as well as of the fi...

This paper investigates, through a case study, the interaction paradigms that can be adopted in a museum exhibition involving hybrid interactive artifacts, i.e., installations that support visitors manipulating and interacting with physical and digital exhibits [6], [1]. We discuss the design principles and solutions we adopted in a temporary exhib...

The paper discusses the design and evaluation of a museum exhibition named The Fire and The Mountain, where we exploited hybrid (i.e., digital and physical) artifacts as well as the paradigm of tangible interaction to enhance children' experience and to support engagement, learning, and social behavior.

Various technologies based on data-intensive Web applications are developed to increase the accessibility of the websites, called as the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). The need is to create the Web content that is perceivable, feasible, and understandable by a broad range of users with robustness to work with the current and future technologie...

Current Web applications are very complex and highly sophisticated software products, whose usability can greatly determine their success or failure. Defining methods for ensuring usability is one of the current goals of Web engineering research. Also, much attention is currently paid to usability by industry, recognising the importance of adopting...

Finding a previously visited page during a Web navigation is avery common and important kind of interaction. Most commercialbrowsers incorporate history mechanisms, which typically aresimple indexes of visited pages, sorted according to the timedimension. Such mechanisms are not very effective and are quitefar from giving users the impression of a...

As the amount of information on the World Wide Web continues to grow, efficient hypertext navigation mechanisms are becoming crucial. Among them, effective history mechanisms play an important role. We therefore decided to provide a new method to access users' navigation histories, called xMem (Extended Memory Navigation), building on semantic-base...

Computer based information repositories are becoming larger and more diverse. In this context the need for an effective information retrieval system is related not only to the efficiency of the retrieval process but also to its compatibility to support information seekers during a typical problem solving activity (Marchionini 1995). OMERO project (...

Finding a previously visited page during a Web navi-gation is a very common and important kind of interac-tion. Although most commercial browsers incorporate his-tory mechanisms, such mechanisms are typically very sim-ple indexes of visited pages, sorted according to the time di-mension. They are not very effective and are quite far from giving use...

Culture is crucial in understanding how people use technologies and designing better ones. However, very little is known about cross-cultural aspects of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) use by older people (60+), despite the heterogeneity of this user group. This short paper addresses this issue by drawing on an ethnographical study...

In recent years, computer based repositories are becoming larger and more diverse thanks to the diffusion of technologies such as the Internet and the World Wide Web. In this context one of the most common problems people have when using the net is finding specific information (Bernard, Chaparro, 2000). It is clear that the complexity and the amoun...