Multidisciplinary Design of Sharing Services

This chapter explores the relationship between sharing economy and service design to describe how the latter can contribute to innovation in designing sharing services. In the initial part of the chapter, a short summary on innovation in services and its relationship with the service design is described. In the central part, some case studies analysed during the SERSE research are reported in order to define a model of analysis based on three design features for designing services in and for the sharing economy: collaboration, participation and networking. In the final section, some design reflections on the contribution of service design in the sharing and collaborative economy are outlined.

The sharing economy is based on a mentality shift of the people that are everyday more lean to share their private life through the social networks with a resulting establishment of a collective consciousness and an increase of trust in each other through the act of sharing. Consequently, the physical spaces must also be considered today as new entities involved in the phenomena of sharing, supporting, together with their environmental, functional and aesthetic characteristics, the various sharing activities. Moreover, in the information society, we live simultaneously in different spaces and times and the digital access to services sometimes needs to be transformed into something more physical to permit the real exchange of experience and knowledge, to meet real people in a material arena. The boundary between virtual and physical space is getting everyday thinner and more invisible because, nowadays, digital devices are defining the landscape in the urban scenario, establishing interactions and links regardless of the materiality of a place itself. What happens is a sort of dematerialization of the physical space which supports a no-stop digital flow, filtered by the social system of relationships. People in fact assume the role of the interface between the two spaces, defining urban landscape and spatial relationships through digital systems. According to the principles of sharing economy, people may act as a physical link into the space in order not to lose the relationships that take place in the physical dimension, while the current social life is quickly shifting to a virtual scale. Sharing activities in the public space would transform the city scenario itself into a stage for people aggregation, where users generate an online/offline information’ landscape through physical–digital actions, defining and designing at the same time flow patterns in both physical and virtual spaces. In this context, the aim of this chapter is to analyse how the use of space changes in the different sharing services and how it should be redesigned to accommodate them to the best, according to experts of spatial design.

This chapter aims to explore possible implications, in the spatial design field, of new forms of hospitality that have emerged with the sharing economy. In particular, after a first analysis of the current state of contemporary cities and their rapid evolution towards increasingly fluid formats, the temporal variable is identified as a possible key. It influences the design approach from an extrovert point of view and therefore an urban transformation that starts from the interior space, which introverts, moving towards a change in the discipline approach to the design of domestic interiors.

This chapter analyses the influence of the sharing economy upon the design of hospitality spaces from the specific point of view of the interior design. In particular the analysis is dedicated to describe how the impact of the web platforms on the hospitality based on the sharing of spaces and services—especially AirBnB for the global relevance—are transforming the hospitality system based on hotels and hostels not only introducing new formats and new concepts in this field, but also stimulating a relevant afterthought of the interpretation of hospitality. In the contemporary society, collective spaces are considered very relevant to civic, architectural, urban and morphological richness of a contemporary city. In particular the spaces for hospitality, like hotels and hostels, but also new formats recently developed and strictly related to the domestic sphere, are also acquiring more and more relevance because this typology of spaces has been very sensitive to the social, economic and cultural transformations related to new ways of living–working–travelling based on “in-motion” lifestyle. Spaces to welcome people who spend their life “in transit” acquire a meaningful importance determining the massive increase of the use and the design of innovative hybrid spatial solutions able not only to answer to new needs and behaviours, but also to translate new collaborative processes in inclusive places where guests/people “feel like at home”.

The sharing economy has spread since 2004, but it is only in recent years that consultants and academics have started doing empirical research. The first evidences—even amid still contradictory results—show a common finding: while sharing platforms aimed their communication on the values of sociability and sustainability, consumers use more often the platform for convenience or savings. This does not exclude that from this type of individual motivations can descend collective advantages, but it is naive to attribute these results to a direct intent. It is also useful to distinguish between different forms of sharing economy: if the rental economy is often moved by rationally purposeful actions and those related to forms of reciprocity by affective actions, the motivations behind common pooling practices can be traced to the concept of “contribution” developed to explain the connective actions in open source communities.

The aim of this chapter is to review and analyze the contribution of Operational Research (OR) in both the design and the management of shared transport services. If, on the one hand, for some specific fields, such as mobility services or collaborative logistics, there are several studies showing the benefit provided by OR (e.g., the impact of vehicle relocation algorithms in the management of bike/car sharing services), on the other hand, there are a lot of potential applications of OR that deserve to be still investigated.

The article describes the main legal challenges for regulating the sharing (or collaborative) economy in Europe and explains how the existing body of EU law applies to these new business models. In the last part, it makes a few brief comments on the need for future regulation.

This paper aims to increase awareness of the relationship between sharing economy initiatives and human diversity. The issue is characterized by particular physiological or pathological situations, or in consideration of different disabilities. Contemporary society is increasingly permeated by initiatives, in many areas, that facilitate people’s daily activities, and specific services are emerging from sharing economy’s area. The text will illustrate three different service design approaches: an exclusive, an integrative, and an inclusive ones. Case studies presented are mostly related to the mobility and hospitality, in Italy and Europe.

In a moment when city rethinks mobility and users redefine urban transport practices, car sharing takes on a strategic function. However, the ability to develop a shared mobility encounters different resistances—cultural, social and economic—that need to be considered for a truly effective service design. The chapter analyzes the case study of the car2go car-sharing service in Milan based on data collected from a representative sample of users (N = 3758). The analysis shows that the most frequent users are young (under 35), employed, male, with higher education, residents in the city and with limited mobility needs related to the family. They are attracted by the flexibility and convenience of the service, in terms of access to limited traffic areas or free parking. The affordability of the service sets car sharing as a potential replacement of car ownership. Moreover, the price is the factor that most affect the level of overall satisfaction of the users. This doesn’t mean costumers asking for a lower price, rather eliminating price-burdens and, at the same time, elaborate more transparent pricing policy. The inter-modality is the most important challenge for the service configuration, with the coverage of areas and times when the public service is most lacking and the provision of integrated subscriptions.

This chapter, in continuation to Chap. 3, investigates the new concept of contemporary living influenced by digital technology and its relation with the urban spaces of consumption, connection and activity, which define the relationships’ places within the public space. A selection of case studies of shared spaces such as the HomePlus Subway Store by Tesco in Seoul, Inamo Restaurant by BlackSheep in London and Digital Metro Library by Humanitas and Vodafone in Bucharest are analysed in order to highlight a design strategy focused on reactivating urban space through the overlap between physical and digital spaces. The action of space virtualisation and digitalisation generates sharing behaviours. Specifically, the references taken in consideration represent examples of best practices which define actual examples of the activation of sharing behaviours in shared spaces.

This chapter is devoted to a specific case of sharing economy in Milan, broadening the vision to include the influence that infrastructuring processes have not only on the complex socio-technical system (scale-up) but also on a single case at local level (scale-down), supporting the authors in a reflection of the impact of the sharing economy on management innovation. We describe Italianway, a Milanese platform that links visitors with the local communities and services to offer an authentic experience of the city; in the creators’ words: “Live like a local, welcome to Milan”. This chapter illustrates the favourable factors of the wider contemporary scenario on local economic growth, enabling the introduction of innovative solutions into a traditional economic system through the hybridisation of the sharing economy approach with and within a given milieu.