This open access book discusses service design capabilities in innovation processes, and provides a framework that guides design students, practitioners and researchers towards a better understanding of operational aspects of service design processes. More specifically, it revisits service designers' capabilities in light of the new roles that have opened up in innovation processes on different scales. After years of being inadequately defined, the professional profile of service designers is now taking shape. Today private and public institutions recognize service designers as essential contributors to their innovation and development processes. What are the capabilities that characterize a service designer? These essential capabilities are what service designers should acquire in their education and can sell when looking for a job.

This open access book discusses service design capabilities in innovation processes, and provides a framework that guides design students, practitioners and researchers towards a better understanding of operational aspects of service design processes. More specifically, it revisits service designers' capabilities in light of the new roles that have opened up in innovation processes on different scales. After years of being inadequately defined, the professional profile of service designers is now taking shape. Today private and public institutions recognize service designers as essential contributors to their innovation and development processes. What are the capabilities that characterize a service designer? These essential capabilities are what service designers should acquire in their education and can sell when looking for a job.

This book investigates novel methods and technologies for the collection, analysis and representation of real-time user-generated data at the urban scale in order to explore potential scenarios for more participatory design, planning and management processes. For this purpose, the authors present a set of experiments conducted in collaboration with urban stakeholders at various levels (including citizens, city administrators, urban planners, local industries and NGOs) in Milan and New York in 2012. It is examined whether geo-tagged and user-generated content can be of value in the creation of meaningful, real-time indicators of urban quality, as it is perceived and communicated by the citizens. The meanings that people attach to places are also explored to discover what such an urban semantic layer looks like and how it unfolds over time. As a conclusion, recommendations are proposed for the exploitation of user-generated content in order to answer hitherto unsolved urban questions. Readers will find in this book a fascinating exploration of techniques for mining the social web that can be applied to procure user-generated content as a means of investigating urban dynamics.