The POLIMI DESIS Lab ideated and managed a training and experimental design programme for the Consorzio Scuola Umbra di Amministrazione Pubblica on service design and social innovation with a specific application to several local case studies.  The main objective of this programme, named precisely as a "school," was to train skills in the public system useful for designing services in the welfare area to be more responsive to citizen demands and needs. 
 
The School aimed to transfer a systemic approach of design thinking and to provide:

• basic contents on the service design discipline;
• methods and tools of co-design;
• basic elements of social innovation theory and processes.

The objectives of the experimental design phase were:

• to design and pre-prototype some services as an end result of the course;
• to trigger new alliances between participants and potential stakeholders;
• to create a model of participatory service design closer to citizens, and thus a greater awareness of being able to affect the processes of public administration on its communities.      The School was organized into 3 main phases:

Phase 1. Preparation and consensus building
Upstream of the programme was a preparation phase: POLIMI DESIS Lab supported the Consorzio Scuola Umbra di Amministrazione Pubblica on a path of internal consensus-building, through a specific work of presenting and explaining methods and core competencies so as to prepare the ground for the emergence of two service directions then field of the subsequent experimentation.
 
Phase 2. Experimental design
A 4-stage process in which participants were accompanied in the design of a service in all its parts, with face-to-face moments of explanation and practical exercises aimed to develop the whole project. The 4 phases of the experimental design correspond to the 4 phases of the well-known "Double Diamond" model and alternated divergent moments with convergent ones, moments of openness in which possibilities and choices were multiplied, and moments of synthesis in which decisions were made and an idea is converged upon. 
 
Phase 3. Formalization, transfer and dissemination
The final phase of the programme was focused on transferring  what had been done through the creation of a Guide Book to be bequeathed to the consortium, so that what was learned in the School could be replicated independently in the future.