Digital Future Design: Designing Digital Service Systems based on Future Visions

Abstract

Recently, initiatives that use advanced digital technologies to address social issues and drive social innovation, such as the “smart city”, have been attracting attention. While public expectations for smart city projects are high, they are often executed from a technocentric approach that lacks a human-centered perspective, which leads to various criticisms and opposition from residents. This necessitates a method for envisioning a desirable future society and designing the entire service system, including digital technologies (i.e., digital service system), from a human-centered perspective. Therefore, we have developed a novel design method, called Digital Future Design Method, that supports the designing of digital service systems for realizing the social transformation to a desirable future vision, and conducted a case study to demonstrate its usefulness. The results demonstrated its effectiveness in enabling us to have a future vision-based thinking in design from the comprehensive perspectives of the social, digital, and physical domains.