This year's Service Design course put the youth of Bergamo in the spotlight. This three week investigation started with service-oriented research.
Bergamo is home to thousands of young people who are navigating education, early careers, and the transition to independent adult life-particularly at a moment when choices increasingly shape long-term outcomes. Despite strong affinity to the city and heritage, many voung residents face fragmented access to housing, work, community, and civic participation, making it difficult to build stable, long-term futures in the city.
IDP participants conducted nearly two weeks of Life-Centred Research in Bergamo, this uncovered various needs, desires, pain points, and ultimately opportunities for 18-24 year olds. Their field research was comprehensive, utilising essential methods such as sacrificial prototypes, intercepts, 1:1 interviews, and observations. A wealth of data, information, and a deeper body of knowledge was generated that led to core insights concerning stakeholders, organizations, and community relationships.These insights then became the foundation for team’s projects and services that all attempted to answer one key question. How might the municipality of Bergamo provide services, systems, and experiences that enable young people to build viable and fulfilling long-term lives locally?
The results are a rich tapestry of inspired community level services that facilitates:
- Connecting youths seeking jobs to employers based on their passions that have been translated into skills.
- A platform that enables people within a climbing gym community to seek advice and support from one another to build bonds and relationships that expand beyond the walls of their gym.
- A conversation starter and platform that enables youths to become more civically engaged by showing how their direct participation shapes political outcomes.
Andrew is a service and user experience designer, focusing on bringing the needs of the end users when working with clients. His objective is to design products and services that provide outcomes that are beneficial to users and clients, through the use of multiple design methodologies, frameworks and tools.
He is currently at frog and has previously worked at design agencies such as Publicis.Sapient and Fjord. His work has spanned across various industries, with a recent focus in the life sciences and pharmaceutical industry.
Originally from Vancouver, he's been based in London since leaving Copenhagen after completing the CIID Interaction Design Programme (IDP) back in 2012. He has been an active member of the CIID community as a mentor, final project advisor and a leader of the London CIID community.
Evie Cheung is a service designer and researcher who moves between strategic storytelling, behavioral science, and systems thinking to understand what really drives human behavior—and how design can respond. Her work has taken her from hospital networks to telecoms centers, from exploring AI ethics to the impact of dating apps, and from corporate boardrooms to classroom critiques...and beyond.
Evie is an alum of frog Design, Deloitte Digital, and Johnson & Johnson, and has also advised several startups and boutique design agencies. She is an adjunct professor of Design Research at the School of Visual Arts' MFA Products of Design program. Additionally, she is leading a personal research project focused on men and boys' experiences navigating the modern dating world.
You can usually find her by the sea, on a motorcycle, cooking up some new pasta dish, or searching for the best hole-in-the-wall dumpling spot.
