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Design for Social Innovation through Social Computing
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What we do
The research of this DESIS Lab shall confront aforementioned three challenges, focusing in social computing not just as a technology, but more importantly as an enabler (a platform or a tool) in a design context.
Social computing is firstly seen as the computational facilitation of service centric design that integrates the Web of People with the Internet of things, that shortens the feedback loop in adaptive systems and services, and that enables the service to be carried out in in a more flattened and bottom up social structure. With the facilitation service design can be carried out in an interactive and sustainable process. In this process data and input can be collected social interaction among the uses and the stakeholders and from the behavior of the users and the products, analyzed and quickly or directly fed back to the process. There is a need to investigate how to tightly combine and coordinate these computational, physical and social elements to facilitate the service and the design process of it.
Social computing is also seen as a computational platform for social innovation. The aim of the research in this respect is to develop methods, tools and techniques based on social computing to support design as social innovation and design for social innovation. In the case of design as social innovation, the research shall investigate how social computing can be used to support the collaborative design activities by the designers as well as other stakeholders including the end users and to enable collective creativity and intelligence in dealing with the complexity of the systems of today. In the case of design for social innovation, the research shall investigate how to use social computing for design to trigger and support social innovation that leads to societal transformations, by introducing design perspectives and design intervention in a social context.
Social computing could be used for validating design in earlier phases of the process. It is interesting to investigate how social computing could be utilized as a simulation platform for earlier concepts in this case physical prototypes might be still be necessary but the situational context (people, other things and the environment) can be brought in or closer in order to quest the concept earlier.
The perspective and the competency of using social computing as an enabler in design should be implemented in the design education if the aim of the education is creating intelligent systems, products and related services in a social context. This research should investigate how this can be carried out in a competency-centered learning process, and how to utilize the social computing technologies to facilitate this process.