The course “Data and Service Design: Designing Data-centric Services” is part of the Master of Product Service System Design of the School of Design (A.Y. 2024/2025). It intends to provide service design students with the conceptual and theoretical tools to understand the “datafication of society” and integrate data as part of their service design practice.
Throughout an approach both theoretical and practical, the students will investigate the main topics in the contemporary data landscape. They will relate to them the service design perspective under the notion of data-centric services, while engaging in data practices hands-on.
The learning path will follow three stages : 1) Data-driven research for service design; 2) Data-driven representations for service design, and 3) Designing data-centric services.
The course aims to provide service design students with the conceptual and practical tools for critically understanding the role of data in society, relate it to their service design perspective, and make data an integral part of their service design practice.
Students are invited to engage with the concept of “data” by following three guiding principles:
- Everything could potentially be seen as data
- Data is not a neutral material
- Data supports both “research for” and “ideation of” new services
Starting from these premises, the class will approach the course topic through a three-stage learning framework. Each stage will include dedicated lectures, hands-on activities and involve specific guest experts.
Private and public organizations harness vast quantities of data to optimize their services. The adoption of data-driven services has become prominent across multiple sectors, including welfare, healthcare, taxation, and mobility.
These services often incorporate semi-automated systems that leverage data analytics and user profiling to enhance performance aspects within the supporting digital infrastructure. In the past years, some of them, hindered by biases in data and flawed design, have led to harmful outcomes. Notable examples include the scandals connected to Robodebt Scheme in Australia, childcare benefits in the Netherlands, the surge in Uber prices as people fled Hurricane Katrina, or racist labels due to biased dataset in content recognition algorithms. These cases clearly illustrate how today services stand at the intersection between digital automation, organizational strategies, users interaction, regulations and ethics.
This centrality demands that service designers develop their literacy about data and related socio-technical dimensions. In their designing, services designers should consider how data interplays with value co-creation — within, and beyond, the services systems they design for.
Course perspective
From Data-Driven Services to Designing for Data-Centric Services
Data collection and storage have become routine for public and private organizations. In particular, administrative and service data (also called micro-data), are routinely recorded by private and public data holders throughout their activities and services. Consequently, several organizations find themselves in the position of being data holders. In other words, as a by-product of their activities, they possess relevant data that can be turned into value. However, to effectively utilize this data requires addressing significant interoperability barriers—including accessibility, management, and representation—while ensuring compliance with legal and technical frameworks.
Against this background, the course advances the concept of Data-Centric Services. We emphasise the importance of designing for services by leveraging data generated by scattered digitised information systems — not yet linked, collected, or used consistently. Service designers can engage with data-centric services as they bring a service perspective useful for making sense and creating value of scattered data sources, while orienting data holders sense-making and building collaboration among them.
Data practices for service designers
With data-centric services, Data Practices represent this course’s other central concept, that is particularly necessary to acknowledge data’s non-neutral and biased nature. Standing in contrast to an abstract idea of data, the notion of data practice compels students and scholars to recognise it as a material that is always made by someone (Burkhardt et al., 2022).
Data is, therefore, intrinsically linked to social, political, organisational and material conditions. The pervasiveness of data in services—and the strong relationship between the two—requires future service designers to engage with data as one of the materials of their practice, acknowledging not only the operational principles of data in services but also democratic and ethical ones (Falk, 2023). This includes considerations such as the public acceptability of data collection, equitable representation of all populations involved, and what will be the ultimate effect of data, both in service systems they design for and beyond them.
Through these two lenses, the course asks students to embrace the pervasiveness of data at the service research and prototyping level, critically engage in data collection, manipulation, and visualisation, and develop insights from data and to involve stakeholders throughout their service design activity.
Course structure
Data-driven research for service design
This stage of the course will focus on the basics of accessing and manipulating heterogeneous data sources, such as those available from the web and social media. At this stage, students will be invited not only to learn how to work with data but also to understand “hands-on” how datasets have been constructed and for which representation purpose.
Data-driven service design representations
Service designers use service representations and prototyping to engage with final users and stakeholders (e.g., to refine initial service ideas). This stage of the course will focus on how to work with data in a service representation perspective, and which methods/tools can be used for the collection, analysis and visualization of heterogeneous data sources.
Designing data-centric services
Service designers who seek to develop new services centered on available data must engage with dimensions pertaining to regulation, privacy, data governance and ownership. Moreover, they must consider the legal and ethical implications of accessing and using data that describe certain populations. At this stage, the students will be asked to self-reflect on the data they worked with in the previous stage and imagine possible ideas of services centered on the connection between several data sources.
Guest lectures
Paolo Ciuccarelli - Northeastern University, Politecnico di Milano
Title: "Design and Data: Perspectives"
Ruth Lund - Samordningsförbundet Centrala Östergötland
Title: "Embracing the messiness: designing and implementing a digital guide for navigating Regional welfare services based on several public data sources"
Gabriele Colombo - Politecnico di Milano
Title: "The web as a source of data: An introduction to digital methods"
Beatriz Belmonte - Better Public Services
Title: "Personalised and proactive for citizens & the life cycle of public digital services"
Petter Falk - Karlstad University
Title: "Data and/in democracy. Power, governance and value in data-driven public services"
Faculty
Francesco Leoni
Postdoc research fellow at Politecnico di Milano’s Design Department. He works at the Design Policy Lab and Polifactory, developing research in the field of “design for policy” by studying data-centric innovations in the public sector.
Andrea Benedetti
PhD in Design, currently UX/UI Designer at Università la Statale Milano. His work revolves around using data to communicate invisible and complex issues.
Teaching assistant
Marianne Fosca Stahl
Industrial designer with a degree in Arts from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú for over ten years back in Perú, and participated in projects of different natures fixing the best solution for them. Interested in understanding better how to design life-centric solutions, she recently graduated from the Specialized Master of Service Design in POLI.design and moved to Milan to start anew.
