When it comes to transforming cities, what better source of information could there be than the people who walk its streets, jog through its parks, send parcels from its post offices, ride its buses, and spend money at its local shops?
D4SC develops technologies that put the power of real-time, collaborative intelligence gathering in the hands of members of the community, and allows them to start the conversation.
And because D4SC designs products and services that integrate into a city’s touch points, the feedback process is totally unobtrusive.
We respect people's privacy to their data. We believe in a new kind of social engagement contract where people can actively opt in should they chose to, as they go about their day – say, visiting a hospital or using the transport network – and participate in solving urban challenges by sharing their active data (photos, comments, location, etc.) to help prioritise what needs to be improved in the city infrastructure in real time.
Thus the conversation is happening by aggregating data from multiple sources, getting people to prioritise what’s important, and completing the feedback loop between the city, the community and local businesses and services.
It’s this unique combination of enabling social conversations with local neighbourhood residents, city dwellers, service providers, sensors, city authorities and all people who use everyday city services in real time.
Products: Our urban innovation software & programs
Changify platform is a highly purposed scalable social-network. Changify is developed to solve urban challenges with businesses, communities and service providers
An API-based solution with easy integration across the ecosystem as an end to end solution. It aggregates service reports , crowdsources prioritisation of what needs doing and completes the feedback loop between city, community and business entities.
After piloting our Changify events in 5 cities, we have innovated a unique hyper-local loyalty program that ties up local retailers to the goals and outcomes of local communities seeking change.
The Citizen canvas is a collaborative change tool that helps various groups of stakeholders work together to arrive at a common vision for what a smart city should be. It follows a citizen centric design process to help shape smart city roadmaps. It can be used online and offline.
Community CoLabs gives cities a community incubator where all local people can come to learn a new skill, create a prototype of changes to infrastructure that they would like to see enacted, and challenge policy to rethink how cities are run.
Pilot programs are bespoke projects co-created to solve specific urban challenges. Each project is focussed on a particular brief e.g. - reducing air pollution, decreasing obesity in the community, improving road infrastructure in real time. We apply our tools- Citizen Canvas, toolkit and platform - Changify to tackle these challenges with communities.
We encourage true collaboration and community involvement.
We can navigate through tricky stakeholder management.
We enrol all players, from top down to bottom up and everything in between.
The system receives constant feedback from people and businesses into city operations.
The city’s infrastructure is no longer solely reliant on technology alone.
This results in a service transforming to a self-identifying, self-prioritising, self-solving system.
We improve city service delivery by bringing people together with city operations.
We report, track and measure impact to business service KPIs
We remove the need for costly and time-consuming consultation by removing middlemen.
The Citizen Canvas workshop is the first step in smart city road-mapping to understand the needs of those involved in the vision and definition of smart cities. We help the players – such as mayors and technology architects – to rethink how they approach the design of smart cities and arrive at a common vision with communities.
Change Management is an evidence-based service design process that helps stakeholders to understand key customer pain-points and transition to a smarter state. It also understands what is needed (culturally as well as technologically) to rollout smart city services from a data, customer journey and service operations standpoint.
Unlike traditional digital transformation programs, our approach is holistic across social, business-model, customer and products and service operations. We work by understanding the end state of desirable outcome that needs to be achieved and then get to the core of the business that needs to be transformed.
We help businesses rethink their core value proposition, marrying back office and front office service operations to align purpose, brand values and customer needs to improve customer experience, revenues, service efficiency and KPIs.
We regularly undertake custom product development for clients seeking bepoke solutions for new iOT, mobile and smart connected tech projects requiring end to end solutions. We create standalone tech demos/prototypes to detailed specifications to help raise internal funding or inform product roadmaps and strategy. We embed ourselves alongside R&D teams and are experienced working across cultures in India, S.Korea, China and Silicon Valley.
We continue being invited by industry e.g Mobile Monday, universities e.g UCL, RCA, LSE, Syracuse, startup accelerators e.g. Cognicity and Idea London to help mentor, design and teach product development for smart cities, iOT and mobile platforms.
TThe following case studies represent some examples of how D4SC collaborated with them to help them achieve their ambitions
The D4SC team are based across London, Bangalore and Berlin. The company is founded by Priya Prakash with a team across tech, business development, strategy and design. We’d love to hear from you.
Registered office: The Workhouse, 90A Camberwell Road, London SE50EG Company Number: 08485710, Registered in England & Wales. info@design4socialchange.com
