Consortium

Who are we?

University of Bordeaux, FR

Located in the South-West of France, the University of Bordeaux (hereafter UBx) is a multidisciplinary University counting about 45.000 students and 5630 staff. UBx offers 245 curricula leading to national degrees and about 35 international master and doctorate programmes (among which 9 got the Erasmus Mundus label). Its cutting-edge research activities are carried out in 70 research departments associated with major research bodies (CNRS, CEA, INSERM and INRA). UBx has been recently rewarded by the French government for its overall campus strategy for excellence.

Edgeryders, EST

Edgeryders as a company emerged as a spin-off from a Council of Europe / European Commission social cohesion research project of the same name. It is a community-driven not-for-profit open consulting company, providing crowdsourced expert advice and community engagement as a service to corporate and governmental organisations. It develops and deploys community building tools and cutting edge research techniques to detect, aggregate and analyse citizen spotted solutions to key social, economic, ecological and political challenges that societies are faced with.

WeMake, IT

WeMake is an innovative start-up based in Milan and provides a series of innovative services and training to the creative community of the region in the field of digital and traditional manufacturing, high-value technologies and access to a fully equipped Fab Lab. WeMake is a 250 sq/mt urban multifunctional factory providing open and membership based access to digital fabrication tools. Clearing the difference between prototype and finished object, we foster the development of a new model of designer-producer (maker) and small-scale company by facilitating the engineering phase, the rapid iteration of design solutions, the on-demand production of physical/digital artifacts.

Stockholm School of Economics, SWE

Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) is one of the leading business schools in Europe. SSE offers bachelors, masters and MBA programs, along with PhD- and executive education programs. SSE’s Masters in Management program is ranked no. 33 worldwide by the Financial Times. QS ranks SSE no.26 among universities in the field of economics worldwide. SSE is accredited by EQUIS certifying that all of its main activities, teaching as well as research, are of the highest international standards.

Scimpulse Foundation, NL

SCImPULSE Foundation was created in 2013 as the culmination of a year long conversation within a community of young researchers from several EU Universities and private enterprises reflecting on the alignment (or lack thereof) of institutional incentive schemes and real world challenges. SF is a public benefit organization, providing scientific brokering within and across complex research and innovation initiatives. It offers incubation and advisory at the startup phase of ambitious, high-risk projects, and offers a platform for the engagement of stakeholders, scientific and social alike. SF contributes to its community by offering also the minimum bureaucratic and financial infrastructure to deal with private and non-institutional funding retaining a project’s independence and seamlessly mixing resources of diverse origins to guarantee a project’s continuity.

Comune di Milano, IT

The project proposal involved two Divisions of the City of Milan, who have already had the opportunity to cooperate on cross-cutting objectives:

  • Economic Development, Innovation, University and Smart City Division

  • Social Policies and Health Culture Division

Labour Policies, Economic Development, Innovation and Universities** (Councillor Cristina Tajani) is responsible for promoting the smart development of the city as an important step towards economic growth and employment, to attract resources giving rise to development, innovation and social integration in Milan. Since 2014 the Department is working on the development of a “Smart City strategy” with the cooperation of other local entities, universities, enterprises and citizens for a more technological, interconnected, sustainable and inclusive city. http://www.milanosmartcity.org/joomla/

Social Policies and Health Culture (Councillor Pierfrancesco Majorino) is in charge of the implementation and delivery of services and supports targeted to the most vulnerable groups.

As public resources are reduced and the social problems increasing, the promotion of new patterns of sociability can transform some problematic issues into opportunities and, at the same time, supporting others in a less painful perspective, freeing resources for the deep fragility which, in turn, will be included in a social fabric more able to tackle it with the necessary attention.

How do we work together ?

Edgeryders and the University of Bordeaux collaborate in assembling a broad, diverse, open community and forging it into a powerful engine to design care services.

Edgeryders is in charge of community stewardship (by reinforcing the values of collaboration and openness and engaging in respectful, ethical and empathetic community management activities).

The University of Bordeaux takes the lead in deploying their network science expertise to build network analysis-based tools for collective intelligence (while cooperating tightly with Edgeryders).

WeMake, in collaboration with the City of Milan and Edgeryders, takes responsibility for the prototyping activities. WeMake contributes its long experience with interaction design and open hardware, and its centrality in the maker scene.

EHFF takes the lead in re-casting results from the Opencare debate and its prototyping activities into a viable policy in the context of the European model of welfare.

The City of Milan adds to this activity the perspective of a local policy maker, struggling with the very real problems of providing the level of care citizens expect in a time of diminishing resources and fiscal compact. Milan serves as an “internal client”, as its own community welfare program (Welfare di tutti) supports many services that could benefit from a participatory redesign exercise.

Finally, SCImPULSE and Edgeryders’ Ezio Manzini (a reference for both academic designers and the hacker community) provide domain expertise in, respectively, care provision and service design to all project activities.