Luca Simeone- PhD
- Professor (Associate) at Aalborg University
Luca Simeone
- PhD
- Professor (Associate) at Aalborg University
Working at the intersection of design, foresight and strategic thinking
About
128
Publications
47,609
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904
Citations
Introduction
By integrating design, AI-powered data science, and futures thinking, I help organizations become more strategic, innovative, resilient, and impactful. I have conducted research, taught, and consulted at institutions including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Malmö University, UAL, and Milan Polytechnic. My contributions include (co)authoring 7 books and 100+ publications, as well as securing research grants totaling more than €7 million. I currently serve as an Associate Professor at Aalborg University.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2011 - December 2016
January 2014 - January 2014
Position
- Lecturer
Description
- Lecturer in Design Management (Master’s Program in Service Design) Course: Design Management Lab Hours: 16
Publications
Publications (128)
Purpose. This paper investigates the role of design as a knowledge translation mechanism in R&D-oriented open innovation. In particular, the paper intends to look at how design can be used as a means of knowledge transfer among various stakeholders who speak different languages and have divergent needs and interests in a process where knowledge ope...
This paper reviews existing characterizations of strategy from military, business and management studies and examines how these characterizations may help inform strategic design processes. The paper serves as an entry point for both design researchers and practitioners interested in understanding the rich and nuanced perspectives that such varied...
Purpose
This paper explores how learning processes supported by intensive use of design can favour absorptive capacity in open innovation contexts characterised by the interaction of a high number of diverse stakeholders.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper combines the insights from theory with the empirical evidence gathered by adopting a case...
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 econo...
The turn of the 21st century has seen the burst of research on how design can support strategy formation and execution; however, little attention has been placed on the emerging field of design-driven foresight, that is the combined adoption of design and foresight methods to generate more immersive, experiential, and engaging representations of th...
Through case studies from across the globe, this book helps designers understand how forward-looking service prototyping, analysis and tools can promote and create empathic, emotion-oriented and relevant services.
Despite services being at the core of organisations, to create service flows, designers, groups and their diverse stakeholders must nego...
Effective executive leadership is essential for the success and direction of any organization, regardless of the industry in which it operates. However, with today's interconnected economic production and distribution processes spanning complex networks operating in diverse geographic, social, and cultural markets, uncertainty has become more prono...
In recent years, the scope of participatory design has broadened to encompass perspectives and approaches beyond the human realm. This expansion requires considering multiple aspects to fully capture ‘more-than-humans’ diversity and concerns. One approach to tackle this multifaceted challenge is by examining it through the lens of time. However, th...
Amidst the challenges of our time, characterized by pervasive uncertainty
and global crises, despair often overshadows hope. Within the context of design-
driven futuring, where long-term futures and possibilities are envisioned and shaped,
the absence of hope can leave designers feeling powerless and doubting the impact of
their work on a predeter...
As design becomes more oriented towards strategy, services and systems, design learning is no longer something apprentices can develop only with masters’ input and critique. Further, the experimentation and reflection commonly occurring inside studio‐based education is insufficient. Real‐world or live projects offer an alternative to learning strat...
After a long period of maturation, the European commission approved an action plan for Circular Economy in 2015. The plan was received and approved by the EU countries, who followed up with national plans. Once the policies have been set, it is also important to recognise the concrete changes they are triggering in the socio-economic context, and,...
When considering the impact of migrants’ creative practices within superdiverse urban environments and their ability to both represent and engender linguistic, cultural and social change, there is a tendency to rigidly demarcate and separate the crucial roles played by artists, researchers, educators, students and activists. Furthermore, little con...
Service Design is not only a discipline, a profession, and a field of research but also a community of actors (professionals, researchers, organizations, institutions) working on service design practice and research, locally rooted but often globally connected. With Service Design we design the intangible, the behaviors, and the flows among actors,...
Soundscape thinking - i.e., the capability to consider the experiential possibilities offered by a sound environment - has been characterized as critical for all those design activities connected to city making. Yet, traditional design disciplines operating within the urban domain (architecture, urban planning, service design, etc.) do not routinel...
This paper evaluates the human‐centric, systemic and near future‐driven components of Service Design to understand how they can work within a Future Studies and Foresight (FSF) framework. Expanding on empirical evidence gathered from a case study with renters and shareowners in Danish cooperative housing associations (Andelsboligforeningen), the pa...
Theory of Change was created as a logic planning model to explore and represent a potential change in a way that reflects a complex and systemic understanding of development. Even though it is a familiar tool in the context of community initiatives and philanthropic projects, Theory of Change is under‐applied in design as a problem‐solving practice...
This book offers insights into how the Theory of Change framework can be effectively employed in a wide range of social interventions. Presenting its potential to support strategy and strategic thinking, this book offers an entry point to understanding how Theory of Change can be applied beyond the typical domain of aid projects.
Written by leading...
Urgent and consequential issues related to the climate crisis are driving forth research on how to facilitate the emergence of sustainable futures. Strategising can be considered as a key competency for steering current practices from unsustainable paths towards sustainable futures; however, it remains underexplored how it can be animated or suppor...
Urgent and consequential issues related to the climate crisis are driving forth research on how to facilitate the emergence of sustainable futures. Strategising can be considered as a key competency for steering current practices from unsustainable paths towards sustainable futures; however, it remains underexplored how it can be animated or suppor...
Building on empirical evidence gathered from a case study with dementia family caregivers in the Danish healthcare system, the chapter looks at how story-centered co-creative methods, i.e., an iterative practice of gathering and (co)producing stories, can ignite and sustain relational service design and how this can contribute to healthcare innovat...
Since the 1990s, the framework of Theory of Change has been used to address complex contexts of intervention especially in relation to planning and evaluating social practice. Theory of Change can be defined as the systematic and cumulative study of the links between the activities, outcomes, and context of an intervention. The aim of this paper is...
PLR (Personal-Local-Remote) is a spatially-oriented syntax for mapping digital/physical experiences as a system of relationships structuring an actor-centered information architecture that is surveyed, explored, and described by means of a set of simple rules. These rules represent the cognitive load, the relationships, and the relative importance...
Design can express culture, develop novel concepts and new products, underpin business growth, facilitate social innovation, humanise technology, and support and guide systemic change to deliver a better life.
It has been a decade since the time when the EU first recognised design as the source of innovation and included it in the core themes of Eu...
In the past few years, higher education programs in service design have been steadily growing. Mostly positioned as master's degrees within varied faculties and departments, these programs propose quite diverse educational offerings. To explore such variety, this short paper presents the preliminary findings of some in-depth interviews with the coo...
This level suggests a view of services as an aggregation of human, organisational and technical factors to generate potential value. The activity of designers at this level has been widely studied; therefore, this chapter focuses on the specific design capabilities that come into play when working at this level.
The approach to services has changed in the last decades: it has developed from viewing services in relation to their intrinsic differences in products to viewing services as processes of value co-creation. This chapter therefore introduces the evolution of this concept based on the early studies that introduced the idea that services could be desi...
Value is co-created in the moment in which service beneficiaries interact with a service infrastructure, with other beneficiaries, or with technological components. The observation of services at this level reveals that different capabilities are involved in the process of value creation, from the everyday problem-solving capabilities of the servic...
Every action is framed in a broader landscape dominated by a system of values, rules, and cultural, social and political premises. In this landscape, change is slow, evolutionary, and lies outside the control of a designer. Nevertheless, designers can play a role in triggering change and possibly steer it in preferred directions. This chapter illus...
This is a navigation chapter, with the aim of providing a logical frame to summarise the design capabilities at all the levels described in the previous chapters. The reader can use the navigation framework suggested in this chapter to create their own operational paradigm or as a way to use the various tools and toolboxes available in service desi...
Some concluding notes originate from the view proposed by the previous chapters. This particular view is like a picture that captures a portion of a landscape in a specific frame, time and logical context. This chapter clarifies this frame and suggests ways to extend this view beyond the logical, professional and time limitations that a book could...
This short chapter provides descriptions of service designers’ core capabilities. In the chapters that follow, these capabilities are discussed in relation to the three levels of design action.
The chapter investigates two design-based strategies for the engagement of city stakeholders with open data as executed in two recent research and innovation projects (Urban Sensing and Open4Citizens). Both projects explored how open data can be used to develop new services to improve urban quality and livability. However, while one project built a...
This open access book discusses service design capabilities in innovation processes, and provides a framework that guides design students, practitioners and researchers towards a better understanding of operational aspects of service design processes. More specifically, it revisits service designers’ capabilities in light of the new roles that have...
The monitoring of water ecosystems requires consistent and accurate sensor measurements, usually provided from traditional in-situ environmental monitoring systems. Such infrastructure, however, is expensive, hard to maintain and available only in limited areas that had been affected by extreme phenomena and require continuous monitoring. Due to cl...
Many hearing aid (HA) users are dissatisfied with HA performance in social situations. One way to improve HA outcomes is training the users to understand how HAs work. Play&Tune was designed to provide this training and to foster autonomy in hearing rehabilitation. We carried out two prototype evaluations and a prerelease evaluation of Play&Tune wi...
The process of value creation cannot be an exclusive preserve of designers, but it is rather the result of a diffuse problem solving capability. The creation of new value is also connected to the concept of innovation and can happen in different logical contexts, from limited and confined contexts (niches) to consolidated structures (regimes) and t...
This paper analyses an R&D project funded by the European Commission and aimed at studying, testing and implementing technological and gamification-based solutions for hearing impairment. In the course of the last three years, a variety of stakeholders with their different wants and needs, languages and agendas have interacted within the project. P...
This paper presents an introductory review of methods to articulate strategy in design. Articulation is here seen as a process in which strategy is more or less strictly and explicitly identified and described, e.g. in relation to key ideas, directions to follow, goals and expected results. The paper surveys existing literature in design research a...
In today’s world of global wicked problems, constraints and imperatives imposed by an external and uncertain environment render strategic action a quite complex endeavour. Since the 1990s, within community initiatives and philanthropic projects, the construct of Theory of Change has been used to address such complexity. Theory of Change can be defi...
The process of value creation cannot be an exclusive preserve of designers, but it is rather the result of a diffuse problem solving capability. The creation of new value is also connected to the concept of innovation and can happen in different logical contexts, from limited and confined contexts (niches) to consolidated structures (regimes) and t...
Themes such as economy of materials, environmental degradation or optimization of production and consumption flows have long been discussed in design and design research. Lately, the concept of circular economy entered the stage as "an industrial economy that is restorative or regenerative by intention and design" (Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 2013)...
This chapter presents some considerations on the Open4Citizens research project, which adopts design strategies to foster the use of open data and to support the creation of related communities and practices. The intent of the project is, therefore, to operate within the complex area of social change. The chapter will look into the design strategie...
This paper investigates the role of design as a knowledge translation mechanism for social creativity in technology-intensive enterprises’ open innovation practices of. The focus is on how design can be used to connect and combine the contribution of creativity resulting from multiple stakeholders, including entrepreneurs, university students and a...
The increasing production of data is encouraging government institutions to consider the potential of open data as a public resource and to publish a large number of public datasets. This is configuring a new scenario in which open data are likely to play an important role for democracy and transparency and for new innovation possibilities, in rela...
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...
Three key concept domains are considered and explored in a unitary framework. They are: innovation, the only possible response to global crises, aiming at transforming behaviours and practices towards systemic changes and transition; design, a way of creatively conceiving, developing and driving forward new practices for undertaking large scale tra...
This paper analyses a research and innovation action oriented toward creating various technologies to help people with hearing impairment in calibrating their hearing devices and examines how several design artefacts (e.g., sketches, mock-ups, motion graphic videos, prototypes) were used as a knowledge translation mechanism. In particular, the pape...
This paper proposes arts and design as translational mechanisms to connect and align stakeholders, particularly in the context of academic entrepreneurship where multiple stakeholders with different expertise and interests work together in joint endeavors. Insights gathered from an ethnographic investigation carried out at metaLAB - an academic lab...
This paper aims at analysing redundancy as a specific aspect of the design activities tied to 3D Tune-In, an innovation action funded by the European Commission. 3D Tune-In is mainly oriented toward (a) implementing software technologies (binaural spatialization engines, hearing loss simulator and hearing aid simulator) and (b) adopting these techn...
Introduction: 3D Tune-In is a European project aiming to develop applications to help hearing aid (HA) users to better understand their hearing loss and to optimise their hearing through customising the different functionalities of HAs. Two applications have been created for adults that employ a virtual HA which mimics a real HA: Play&Tune and Musi...
Simeone and Patelli, building upon their experience as designers and scholars within the Urban Sensing research project, provide materials for scholars and researchers to reflect upon the potential and limitations of social network analysis and data visualization as research methods in urban studies. The chapter starts with a fundamental considerat...
Recent research calls for greater consideration of design, by considering it further from the perspective of technology innovation management. In the attempt to cover this gap, the paper intends to explore how design can be used to support translational processes that connect and align different stakeholders in academic entrepreneurship. Insights f...
Demonstration of 3D Tune-In results
This article explores the role of strategic ambiguity as a management practice, as used in SENSEable City Lab - a R&D-oriented lab located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. Although literature has already explored strategic ambiguity in various organizational settings, studies focusing on how academic institutions use s...
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to compare two boundary organizations situated in Malmö (Sweden) and oriented toward opening production. Particularly, it looks at how the two organizations tried to establish and communicate their boundaries during their official opening events, which were structured according to the format of hackathon.
Des...
This study investigates the relation between the design activity and entrepreneurial ambition of three academic labs: MIT Senseable City Lab, metaLAB (at) Harvard, and Medea at Malmö University. These labs are positioned at the borderland of academic research, as they operate in connection with external stakeholders (industry, NGOs, government inst...
The EU-funded (Horizon 2020 Grant Agreement No 644051) 3D Tune-In project employs a novel approach using 3D sound, visuals and gamification techniques to support people with hearing aids to understand their many features and how to calibrate them in different real world situations (e.g. at a concert, in a restaurant, on a street, at a train station...
This is a short paper introducing an innovative approach using 3D sound, visuals and gamification techniques to support people with hearing devices to understand their many features and how to calibrate them in different real world situations (e.g. at a concert, in a restaurant, on a street, at a train station, in a classroom). 3D-Tune-In brings to...
Nowadays, thanks to conditions such as agile manufacturing (e.g., using affordable machines like 3-D printers, laser cutters, small CNCs or Pick & Place), low production costs and quick execution cycles, it is easier to turn ideas into a finished product ready to be distributed. Joi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, created the slogan 'Deploy...
This paper reflects upon some limitations of Urban Sensing, a EU-funded research project that explores the potential of social media analysis and data visualization as a source of knowledge for participatory urban planning processes.
In Urban Sensing we did not only collect users’ contributions related to the context of their use and perception of...
Reflecting on the 25th anniversaries of the invention of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the adoption of the Convention on Rights of the Child by the US General Assembly, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and UNICEF co-hosted in April 2014 — in collaboration with PEW Internet, EU Kids Online, the Internet...
TESS (Towards European Societal Sustainability) is a three-year research project receiving funding from the European Commission to study the potential for community-led initiatives to help deliver a low carbon, sustainable future. More specifically, TESS is interested in how existing initiatives (e.g., projects working with renewable energy, car sh...
Purpose-This paper builds upon the notion of academic entrepreneurship as a way to engage with external communities to create value (Kingma 2011) and more specifically analyses how design is used to foster this idea of entrepreneurship in a lab at Harvard in Cambridge, MA.
Approach-The study is the result of an ethnographic investigation I conduct...
In this chapter, we review the fast-expanding and multi-faceted classes of geo-referenced data visualization. By analyzing and interpreting existing projects based on static, motion graphics, and interactive visualizations of geographical information, we have built a taxonomy that crosses and groups the selected cases according to several classes o...
In this chapter, we present our remarks on the design experiments we carried out and we illustrate how the possibilities of visualizing the data city offer a source of knowledge for urban planning and management that can help city stakeholders in important decisions. Some critical issues will also be addressed.
In this chapter, we present a series of design experiments conducted within the Telltale and Urban Sensing projects.
As we highlighted in the previous chapters, social media data differ from conventionally produced geographic information in several aspects, including the source of the information, the technologies for acquiring it, the methods and techniques for working with it, and the social processes involved. This chapter is an attempt at designing a methodol...
In this chapter, we reflect upon how the urban experience is nowadays affected by data produced through interconnected, digital ecosystems such as the user-generated content on social media. We will present the scientific literature related to studies, research projects, and commercial platforms that use geo-located social mining techniques to extr...
This book investigates novel methods and technologies for the collection, analysis, and representation of real-time user-generated data at the urban scale in order to explore potential scenarios for more participatory design, planning, and management processes. For this purpose, the authors present a set of experiments conducted in collaboration wi...
In this chapter, we introduce the aims and the approach behind our research trajectory and present the layout of this book.
This book investigates novel methods and technologies for the collection, analysis, and representation of real-time user-generated data at the urban scale in order to explore potential scenarios for more participatory design, planning, and management processes. For this purpose, the authors present a set of experiments conducted in collaboration wi...
This paper explores the role of strategic ambiguity (Eisenberg, 2007; March & Olsen, 1976) as a management practice, as used in SENSEable City Lab -a design-oriented lab located at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. The paper reports on an ethnographic study conducted by the author in 2011 and reflects on both the potential of...
This paper explores augmented reality as a set of technologies and processes that weave hypermedial content into printed publications thus fostering new educational practices. The idea was to implement a platform fostering what has been defined as 'Mode-2' knowledge production practice. This is a practice that involves multi-disciplinary teams, bro...
This paper presents a prototype for an educational toolkit (DIY GIS) to learn and teach some important elements of urban design, planning and management. The project aimed at developing a platform that addresses geographic mapping as a process that is subjective (of a projection of the user-inhabitant's imagination) as well as objective (of the ter...
This short essay is an introduction to The Cloud, an unrealized architectural proposal for an observation deck as a monument to the London 2012 Olympics. The Cloud would allow visitors to immerse themselves in weather, and the city to connect with digital data; it proposes an innovative solution for energy harvesting and a bottom-up financing model...
Ranjit Makkuni is an Indian interaction designer who currently runs the Sacred World Foundation, a laboratory in Delhi that develops experimental digital media based on natural interactions technologies, augmented reality and wearable computers. Makkuni started his professional career in the Xerox laboratories of Palo Alto, developing programming l...
“A Third Augmented Landscape” is a performative presentation and scientific paper
discussing the outcomes of a research project carried out by FakePress Publishing and
Università di Roma “La Sapienza”: the creation of an open source augmented reality (AR)
system for leaves. This AR system, called LEAF++, is based on a combined series of computer...
Interstitial typography is an aesthetic practice that, as demonstrated in some examples of Paula Scher and E-types, may provide ideas for the design of distributed interactive displays.
Leaf++ is an ubiquitous, interstitial information tool.
It is designed as a new "eye" that can be used to look at the natural landscape of our cities. It is designed to help us see and understand the Third Landscape.
Leaf++ is an augmented reality system which employs computer vision techniques to recognize plants from their leaves, and allows us t...
This paper explores augmented reality as a set of technologies and processes to weave hyper medial content into printed publications thus fostering new educational practices. In particular this paper focuses on augmented reality as a bridge to extend traditional hyper mediality to paper-based educational tools, analyzing a book recently released by...
Questions
Question (1)
Hi everyone, I'm trying to map various business model canvases. The most widespread is the one proposed by Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010), but there are other ones, such as the Service Logic Business Model Canvas (Ojasalo and Ojasalo, 2015) or the triple layered business model canvas (Joyce and Paquin, 2016). Do you know and/or can you recommend any other one? Thank you, Luca
References
Joyce, A., & Paquin, R. 2016. The Triple Layered Business Model Canvas: A Tool to Design More Sustainable Business Models. Journal of Cleaner Production 135 (November): 1474–86. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.06.067.
Ojasalo, J., & Ojasalo, K. 2015. Using Service Logic Business Model Canvas in Lean Service Development. In Proceedings of the 2015 Naples Forum on Service, June 9–12, 2015, Naples, Italy.
Osterwalder, A., & Pigneur, Y. 2010. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley.
