We have just started a new project with Architecture Design Scotland focused on Service Design as social capital at street level.

At the Scottish Design Skills Symposium in September 2010, Colin Mair Chief Executive of Improvement Services said that a key challenge in placemaking is to ‘reclaim streets as an element of social capital.’ He contends that we need places that better support people in a range of ways, enabled by the physical and socio-economic/cultural aspects of place.

The purpose of this project is to demonstrate how Service Design could help strengthen both the sense of place and quality of life of people using streets in Scotland. We want to  inform policy makers and practitioners about the potential of Service Design work with people networks in strengthen streets as of social capital by [a] discussing what social capital is in terms of local assets and capabilities; [b] demonstrating an approach to service design at the scale of a street and [c] by setting out some examples of how this might work in practice in a placemaking context.