Designing for social urban media: Creating an integrated framework of social innovation and service design in China

Abstract

In recent years, social media and social networking are increasing the global crucial topics. More and more people in China begin to merge into this virtual networking. Meanwhile, the continuous expediting of urbanization also occurs in the real world. It is a big challenge for designers to coincide with the new trends of city and media. New design thinking frameworks and methodologies will be needed to solve the emerging problems in the cities of China. As being designers with social responsibility, we have a critical quest that is how to design for the social innovation, sustainably for the most people and improve the social life in the context of developing local and cultural city environment. The trend of service innovation leads a new round of economic growth, which is happing in China. We developed a new framework with three perspectives about social innovation, i.e., social interaction, social integration and social inclusion. To solve the problems brought from urbanization, we need the holistic perspectives with the integrated methods of social innovation and service design. The case studies, which devoted to create the innovated application and service for the urban life in China, show the power of integrating the urban and media together in design thinking and implementation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.