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Research Area

We envision a meta-platform comprised of existing and new platforms, for building a common understanding and fostering collaborative action. This meta-platform will consist of talks, seminars, documents, and other shared initiatives. We aim at sparking conversations within and outside the design field, both in the academic context and in the professional domain: we are reaching out to practitioners, design lovers, academics, and industry players.

Service Design Metrics

While there are many resources for service design professionals, there is rarely any mention of relevant service metrics. Most often, when metrics are referenced, they are high-level that capture the overall experience, such as NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), and Customer Effort Score (CES). Furthermore, there lacks a comprehensive inventory of relevant metrics for service design professionals. Therefore, the goal of our work is to build a comprehensive inventory of service design metrics that are relevant as part of the service design process, as well as the validation of a service experience.

CfD Team Members: Miso Kim, Houjiang Liu, Estefania Ciliotta

Design for Conversations

Facilitating Intercultural Collaboration through Evocative Objects

Teams are composed of people from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. To be successful in navigating this pluriverse, collaborative teams need to develop mechanisms to embrace and nurture the power of diversity. However, teams often lack specific tools and skills to leverage the strengths of diversity. These workshops aim to provide participants with tools to raise awareness of cultural differences and similarities, and experience firsthand the impact of materiality – in the form of evocative objects – as enhancers of intercultural conversations. This project explores how surfacing a variety of mental models through objects is possible and effective in intercultural teams. The goal is to demonstrate how teams can approach a new problem space from different perspectives, benefiting from the power of diversity. Teams can leverage the idea of working with differences rather than seeing them as a problem to overcome.

Learn more here.

CfD Team Members: Estefania Ciliotta, Michael A. Mages

Nordes with Sara for cultural sounds (in progress)

Presented at ServDes 2023.

Design for Emergency

Courtesy of Design for Emergency Website.

Design for Emergency has launched a set of initiatives to face the COVID-19 emergency through design. The first step is to collect information on the experiences of people living in areas heavily affected by coronavirus who cannot leave their homes. The research team aims to understand how fears, problems, hopes and habits are changing. The goal is to quickly design new solutions to address the specific issues of people facing this emergency. These solutions will entertain, connect, and support individuals and communities in new ways.

The Design for Emergency Data Platform collects data about people’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The team investigated how people dealt with restrictions and containment measures introduced by many countries in response to the pandemic; what their emotions, fears and hopes were; what problems they encountered; and how their habits and lives changed since then. The data was collected through a survey disseminated in 12 countries, but the project is still expanding. This website publishes the ongoing results from the analysis of 7500+ responses so far.

Link: Data Platform

CfD Team Member: Estefania Ciliotta, Houjiang Liu

Other Team Members: Danilo Di Cuia, Lucia Marengo, Sara Perozzi

Design Resources Repository 

Design Resources Repository

The Center for Design is curating a collection of resources that might enlighten the community to think about design, design research, and design practice in general as collaborative practice. The team has been gathering all available resources and have built a repository of design tools, trends, methods, publications, case studies, and podcasts to help designers and general practitioners easily find and access information and design materials, following the meta-design approach of enabling platforms for others to choose, design, and act. 

If you have design tools or links that you use or know of, please send them in so that they can be added.

Explore the Repository

CfD Team Members: Estefania Ciliotta, Aashita Jain

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