Live Piloting and Prototyping Services

The paper presents a current trend in Service Design research, which is approaching big scale projects aimed at generating changes at local scale. In doing so the strategy adopted is to co-design solutions including the future users in the development process, prototyping and testing system of products and services before their real implementation. On the basis of the experience achieved in the European project Life 2.0, the paper discusses which methods and competences are applied in the development of these projects, eliciting the lessons learnt especially from the piloting phase in which the Participatory Design (PD) approach plays a major role. In the first part the topic is introduced jointly with the theoretical background where the User Centre Design and Participatory Design methods are presented; then the Life 2.0 project development is described; finally the experience is discussed from a Service Design perspective, eliciting guidelines for piloting and prototyping services in a real context of use. The paper concludes reflecting on the designers\u2019 role and competences needed in this process