Artemis Yagou has sent us the transcription of her interesting intervention during the UnConference in Milan. We have discussed a lot about trust, especially within the Italian context, and invite you to give further comments about the topic:

Hello from sunny Athens, I am Artemis Yagou [www.yagou.gr, artemis@yagou.gr].

 This will be a short intervention on the issue of trust in Service Design, trusting between people involved in services and co-production.

We all understand that the effective functioning of a democratic society—including social, business, and political interactions—largely depends on trust. Creating an environment of trust is at the very heart of personal and organizational success. Many studies show that high–trust organizations have increased value, accelerated growth, enhanced innovation, improved collaboration, stronger partnering, better execution, and heightened loyalty. Yet trust remains a very fragile and elusive resource in many of the organizations that make up society’s building blocks.

The big question is: how to create and build trust?

Creating trust is very hard but it is also a common task in many areas. The biological roots of trust and their implications for human relationships have been studied extensively. In the design domain, trust is crucial for designers’ attempts to create and work out realistic paths from the present toward desirable futures and propose them to those who can bring a design to fruition. Successful designs depend on designers’ ability to enroll stakeholders into their projects, even if these stakeholders pursue their own interests as well. The paths that designers invite stakeholders to take must be presented as realistic, affordable, of benefit to those whose effort is required, and, above all, open valuable opportunities to those affected by a design. Therefore designers need to propose projects that attract others to participate; they need to ensure stakeholders’ consensus by inspiring trust.

In this sense, trust lies at the heart of Service Design activities which define many of our interactions and daily life activities within a modern society.

 My intervention is inspired by the Greek context, where the creation of trust is of particular importance for the future of social services and for the evolution of civic society in general. Greece is a country with a long history of tension or even hostility between citizens and the State. The longstanding distrust and resulting disrespect for the law and government have been having a major impact on public services. The absence of effective institutional procedures and the increasing problems of anarchy reflect the absence of trust between various stakeholders of Greek society.

 Thus, a number of questions involving trust arise and form the backbone of necessary future research:

How is trust created, maintained and solidified?

How to rebuild trust, in cases when it has been undermined or destroyed?

What are the costs for society of citizens’ distrust of public services?

What is the role of State organizations and bureaucracies?

How to build trust in a multicultural society?

What is the role of trust in times of crisis?

How may trust be developed within a Service Design context?

How may trust be built into the design of products and services?

How can design help develop or restore trust towards public sector services?

What are the particular problems engendered in Service Design projects where the State is one of the chief stakeholders?

What can be learnt from examples of good practice in this area?

What strategies may designers use in order to maximize trust on behalf of various stakeholders?

 I believe that the area of trust is a great challenge for the co-production in public services and worth looking at with great attention.

 That’s all I wanted to say and I hope it may cause some discussion during this Unconference. Thank you for asking me to participate!

Where different ethnic and religious communities co-exist, cohesion and prosperity depend on whether interaction between them generates a culture of curiosity, openness and innovation.

I think that it is at the local level that it possible to manage most effectively the cultural dimension of integration, prepare the wider community or increase the competence of policy-makers, public services and the people in general, to start co-creating a “new society”.

My presentation at the Unconferenc in Milan was about how co-production could assume the intercultural dimension to foster integration process and contribute building a more inclusive society.