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A nine-day full immersion to understand, innovate and prototype solutions for urban challenges.

In these recent years the extraordinary revolution made by Information Technology and Service Design has brought people interactions to a new level in terms of complexity and speed. In marginal city contexts, these kind of bottom-up and user-centered approaches, can trigger bigger and more cost-effective transformations than years of expensive top-down policies. In PUSH we believe that cities’ livability can be improved by simply rethinking and redesigning some of the complex processes of being citizens, with the right mix of creativity and technology.

City as a Service Intensive School is a program about design, technology and social impact through digital innovation. Nine days to learn, discuss and deepen the urban dynamics linked to innovation and digital services for citizens with an interdisciplinary and human-centered approach.
Guided by high skilled international professionals, students acquired service design tools and methodologies and they worked in team to develop their innovative idea of service for cities.

The Intensive School proposes an innovative approach for designing services for cities, taking advantage of a unique combination of creativity, technology and new business models.
The program is not only an important experiment at a local level in the field of Service Design, but also a great opportunity to build an international network to trigger future collaborations and ideas among participants.

The students enrolled were 17 coming from Estonia, Ucraina, United States, Uganda and Italy, 28 years old on average. During the 9 days activites they developed 4 project ideas, evaluated at the end of the program, by a jury of experts. The award for the best idea, made available by CoopUp was al costs covered to set up a cooperative in Italy and free use of coworking spaces for one year. For the best presentation, one week at Livework studio in Rotterdam. All the ideas have been presented during the Urban Thinkers Campus, an international event promoted by the United Nations, hosted in Palermo in October 2015.

The project, that took place thanks to the support of the Municipality of Erice, has shown an excellent capacity of involving young professionals coming from different backgrounds, interested in learning the tools of service design. The format can be easily scaled and adapted to other urban contexts with the opportunity to offer new inputs and benefits for the local economy. The Intensive School is thus the first experiment of the larger project PUSH.edu, intended to become a container for educational activities aimed at creating occupation and value for the territory.