Co-Designing with Multiple Stakeholders and Datasets: A Community-Centered Process to Understand Youth Deviance in the Italian City of Turin

TL;DR

This study presents Sbocciamo Torino, a civic tool co-designed with Turin’s municipal authorities, police, NGOs, and social services to address youth deviance. Guided by Research through Design and participatory design, the authors integrate a data dashboard, a stakeholder committee, and regular co-design meetings to enable data-informed collaboration and early intervention planning. The evaluation shows stakeholders value inclusive, data-driven collaboration but face barriers in data literacy, communication, and coordination, underscored by the necessity of political and institutional support for long-term impact. The work contributes practical insights into building civic tools that navigate wicked urban problems through participatory governance, with implications for other cities pursuing collaborative, data-informed decision-making. The tool’s structure—committee, dashboard, and deliberative meetings—embeds participatory practices within city governance, highlighting the importance of legitimacy, trust, and capacity-building in scalable civic infrastructure.

Abstract

This paper presents the co-design and design evaluation of Sbocciamo Torino civic tool, which helps understand and act upon the issues of youth deviance in the Italian city of Turin through multi-stakeholder collaboration and collaborative data analysis. Rooted in research through design and participatory design methodologies, the civic tool integrates a data dashboard, stakeholder committee, and structured co-design sessions to facilitate collaborative analysis and intervention planning. The civic tool was developed in partnership with municipal authorities, law enforcement, NGOs, and social services, and reflects their institutional priorities while centering community knowledge. We describe the iterative co-design process, including stakeholder workshops for design, validation, training, and evaluation. The civic tool's impact on stakeholder trust, collaboration, and decision-making was assessed through surveys and open-ended questionnaires. Our findings show that stakeholders valued the inclusive design approach and data-driven collaboration while revealing barriers in communication, data literacy, and operational coordination. Furthermore, political and institutional support was identified as critical to the civic tool's success. This paper contributes to research on community technologies by demonstrating how civic tools can be collaboratively developed to navigate wicked social problems through participatory design.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Process steps of the participatory design methodology
• Figure 2: Steps followed during the development and testing phase
• Figure 3: Functioning of Sbocciamo Torino
• Figure 4: Snapshot of Sbocciamo Torino Dashboard.
• Figure 5: Plan of a Sbocciamo Torino committee meeting