This contribution examines the application of Service Design within the public sector, drawing on the challenges posed by the so-called wicked problems to understand its potential and limitations. By critically reflecting on the unique constraints and complexities of government services and the differences with their commercial counterparts, the scope is to identify possible trajectories for future research and practice. While Service Design integrates multiple perspectives and works at different scales, responding to external and internal disturbances, it requires a comprehensive knowledge base that considers wicked problems’ properties such as demos, fragility and antifragility, degree of wickedness, public formation, plurality of values and approaches to Service Design for the public sector. Recognising these limitations and opportunities, the contribution invites a more nuanced understanding of Service Design in the public sector to decipher and address societal challenges.

Advancing production systems technology necessitates redefined assessment methods across production stages to address sustainability needs, requiring vast, updated data on material and process impacts. European directives, including the Circular Economy Action Plan, promote waste minimization and resource optimization through fundamental changes in design practices, positioning designers as primary orchestrators of circular material flows. This MICS Project 1.07 research investigates how digital platforms enable designers to coordinate circular solutions in Italy's furniture sector through transparent material data exchange. The study develops an integrated system connecting designers, waste managers, and manufacturers to facilitate circular material flows and comprehensive design processes for circular material applications. The research reveals complex hybrid networks where organizations critically shift between roles as waste producers, material processors, and end-users. Digital solutions address these challenges through AI-driven material analysis, real-time supply chain information, and seamless design process integration. Designers with comprehensive material data can achieve more impactful design toward waste reduction while identifying new market opportunities through by-product valorization. The platform architecture features dual access through web portals and CAD plug-ins, enabling both material exploration and direct design workflow integration. The projects and its insights foresee designers as essential bridges between creative innovation and sustainable production implementation, providing a replicable model for sectors beyond furniture manufacturing.

Faced with the series of recent global crises, current consumption and production models have questioned many practices implemented so far where the quantitative approach moved to a qualitative scale. Recognizing in the urban context an organism capable of optimizing infrastructural and ecological resources, technologies open to economic models and entrepreneurial alternatives of participatory culture as a tool for involvement and self-organization. The research analyses the urban production field, through a series of surveys aimed to define a framework made within the urban digital manufacturing panorama, highlighting the commitment of public initiatives up to those private ones and roles covered by their actors within the urban network. By approaching the Lazio region as a case study, the research investigates those best practices to structure those guidelines and aims to stimulate social innovation interactions, shared knowledge economies, and daily good practices of resilient citizenship. <!----> <!----> <!----> <!---->

Despite European and international regulatory frameworks promoting circular economy principles, sustainability in the furniture sector is still challenged by the limited access to reliable information about circular materials for designers, manufacturers, and waste managers in the Made-in-Italy furniture ecosystem. This research develops a digital infrastructure to address these information gaps through mixed methodology, combining desk research on regulatory frameworks and existing platforms; field research involving stakeholder mapping and interviews with designers, manufacturers, and waste managers; and the experimental development of AI-enhanced digital tools. The result integrates a web-based platform for circular materials with a CAD plugin supporting real-time sustainability assessment. As AI-assisted data entry showed a reduced form completion time while maintaining accuracy through human verification, testing also revealed how the system effectively bridges knowledge gaps between stakeholders operating in currently siloed value chains. The platform is a critical step in enabling designers to incorporate circular materials during the early design stages, while providing manufacturers access to verified punctual sustainability data compliant with mandatory Green Public Procurement criteria. Beyond the development of an innovative digital tool, the study outlines a corresponding operational model as a practical framework for strengthening the transition toward a circular economy in the Italian furniture industry.