A Community Centered Design approach to developing service prototypes

This paper presents Feeding Milan, an ongoing research project on sustainable “place” development, focusing on the importance of using a Community Centred Design approach (CCD) and service prototyping as strategies to build collaborative food networks. In this framework sustainable urban and periurban development is the central objective of the work, where the hypothesis that only by using local resources and by activating collaborative and open services it is possible to pursue real, tangible and effective improvements in quality of life and environmental benefits. The CCD approach is presented, then the authors outline a service design tool developed for co-designing with and within the local food communities and they define the process of service prototyping applied to an on-field case. The paper concludes by describing the project as a Living Lab, where the aim is to point out how service design may improve the quality of life in rururban areas by involving local communities in targeted steps of the solution development process, in order to support agricultural activities and shorten up the food chain.