Service Design Research UK (SDR UK) aims to create a UK research network in an emerging field in Design that is Service Design. This field has a recent history and a growing, but still small and dispersed, research community that strongly needs support and visibility to consolidate its knowledge background and enhance its potential impact. Services represent a significant part of the UK economy and can have a transformational role in our society, if we think of how they affect the way we organize, move, work, study or take care of our health and family. Design introduces a more people-centred and creative approach to service innovation, which is critical to delivering more effective and novel solutions that have the potential to tackle contemporary challenges. The UK is a leader in the development of Service Design, mainly driven by design practitioners (Engine, Livework, Thinkpublic, Participle, Snook, etc.) and organizations such as the Design Council, Design Wales, Demos, Young Foundation, NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement. In this scenario the academic contribution to the development of Service Design as a subject of research and practice has been instead weak and dispersed. This network aims to: 1. Identify, compare and map current research work into Service Design in UK; 2. Increase understanding of and demand for Service Design as a practice and research field in UK; 3. Identify research and knowledge gaps in the field to inform PhD studies and future research projects collaborations and ideas; 4. Increase visibility and connectivity of SDR UK nationally and internationally. The research network will create the opportunities, for the SDR UK's emerging research community, to converge around three main themes: 1) Service Design for Innovation; 2) Service Design for Social Good; 3) Service Design for Sustainability. Three thematic workshops will bring together academics, designers, public and private sector organizations and relevant institutions to collect and map the research work done till now, discuss project exemplars, share experiences and identify research gaps and future research themes. The workshops outcomes will be made available on a dedicated on-line platform, where the emerged research questions will be used to inform an on-line forum. SDR website will be linked with existing national and international initiatives and on-line communities related to the topics of service research and innovation. The international Service Design and Innovation (ServdDes) conference to be held at Lancaster University in April 2014, will host a final public event to present SDR UK results and to organize discussion tables around the emerged research themes to springboard possible future research collaborations.

UK Cities face wide-ranging challenges including: inequality, crime, housing shortages, infrastructure congestion, carbon dependency, environmental degradation, and low skills. Local governments are working to address these against a background of prolonged financial austerity, electoral disengagement, misalignments in priorities between central and other tiers of government, rigid funding cycles, organisational silos and low levels of information, all of which contribute to sub-optimal decisions that can intensify persistent problems and degrade public confidence. Given this context, this project is committed to transformation based on enhancing capacity to better manage urban complexity in ways that promote co-production and collaborative working practices, civic enterprise, retain local value and develop new types of institutions. This project mobilises a multi-sector consortium called TRUE (Transformational Routemapping for Urban Environments) to collaboratively diagnose interrelated urban challenges. TRUE represents meaningful commitment from the university, public, private and civil society sectors to collaborative working in Leeds. TRUE recognises that a step-change is required in the ways that current urban systems are arranged, and that producing this change entails first understanding the integrated nature of the complexities in current and future urban living systems and the factors (including capacity/capability) that anchor the effective delivery of city-wide solutions. Once this understanding is gained, it is then necessary to establish the capabilities required to deliver them. Finally, steps can be taken to achieve effective outcomes. Key to this is the ability to align stakeholder capability to the complexity of the undertaking at city scales. Failure to do so can result in cost and time overruns, political damage, undelivered objectives and outcomes and other unintended consequences. The aim of TRUE is to adopt a socio-technical systems approach to diagnosing complexity and aligning capability embodied in a tested approach called Project Initiation Routemap (Routemap). By drawing on Routemap and adapting it, TRUE is positioned to rethink how local authorities deliver integrated city-wide solutions. The Routemap brings together learning from the public and private sector ranging from Crossrail to NHS England into a framework that allows users to better align complexity with the capabilities required to manage a complex environments, thus increasing the likelihood of successful outcomes. By first applying and then radically adapting the Routemap, TRUE creates a diagnostic cycle in which transferrable guidance can be developed in a collaborative manner. TRUE has joined up with Routemap consultants to ensure that urban pilot developments will incorporate the full learning of the existing Routemap portfolio and have traction at a national government level. For this urban pilot, TRUE will apply this approach to a selection of priority outcome areas (called Breakthrough Projects) identified by Leeds City Council (LCC). Each of these Breakthrough Projects encompasses a multitude of interrelated challenges and these projects will be used to collaboratively develop TRUE as a novel, highly applicable and transferable holistic diagnostic tool. This tool will have direct potential benefits in terms of assessing systemic complexity and integrated challenges to enhance capacity amongst city actors to support the delivery of citywide solutions that can meet future challenges. It will be presented through an open license digital platform and training guidance delivered by quality assured TRUE partners available to city officials across the UK and internationally. TRUE will be launched at a major city based Launch conference. Through these, TRUE will be uniquely placed to enhance capacity of city teams to support the delivery of integrated city-wide solutions that meet identified objectives.

Understanding Society: the UK Household Longitudinal Study is the largest household panel study in the world, designed to address key scientific and policy questions of the 21st century. It collects high quality annual longitudinal data on individuals of all ages in households which are representative of the UK population. The Study's data enable researchers to explore the experiences, causes and consequences of changes in people's lives - their family structure, health, income, expenditure, employment and housing. The Study has additional dimensions that enable the detailed exploration of the circumstances of key immigrant and ethnic minority groups; investigation of inter-relations between different family members within and across households and generations; and, it collects direct measures of health and genetics to understand how people's health and wider circumstances interact. It is underpinned by robust and innovative methods, and our methodological research creates learning for other studies nationally and internationally. The Study began in 2008 with the Innovation Panel (IP), which tests methods, and the first main wave of fieldwork started in 2009. It builds on and incorporates the British Household Panel Survey, which means for some families we have data from 1991. To date, eight waves of the main Study and ten waves of the IP, as well as data collected from a nurse visit, are deposited at the UK Data Service. Further waves are in planning, in the field or being prepared for data release. This bid covers plans for data collection for Waves 13-15 and IP15-17 a boost sample to increase the size of the Study, and a range of enhancements. Our long term vision for the Study is for it to be based on integrating the best of all kinds of data on a Longitudinal Core, whilst creating novel research opportunities with new data enhancements. Our plans include more timely data collection of key life changes, such as job loss; a pregnancy study; a repeat collection of biological data. We are investigating ways to enhance our content by collecting data with new technologies. We are also planning to expand the Study to engage with key family members who live outside the household, for example, co-parents in separated families and transnational families. We also plan to broaden the range of data we harvest from external sources, as well as individual administrative records, we are investigating how we can obtain contextual data on organisations, such as employers, and places. As in previous bids, we are proposing advertising a number of fellowships competitions to build capacity in the wider research community to use the unique features of the data. Supporting researchers in universities, government, third sector and businesses to use the data effectively is fundamental to the success of the Study. We provide a wide range of resources, services and support to enable users with different backgrounds and from different kinds of organisations to make effective use of the data. We propose enhancing this further by adding a 'data gateway' to our website so users can select the data they need through a shopping basket system. We have a Policy Unit that works directly with government departments and third sector organisations to help them use Understanding Society data, and we undertake a wide range of activities to promote findings based on the Study to policy users. In this phase the Policy Unit will develop partnerships with different organisations to facilitate policy communities learning from high quality research based on the Study. We plan to continue to promote research from the Study widely through events, publications, briefings, on our website and through social media. Taken together, we firmly believe that the continued collection of data on a longitudinal core and the new data enhancements proposed will significantly increase the high quality impactful research based on the Study and hence its value to society.

Hamburg (DE), London (UK) and Milan (IT) have decided to create CLEVER Cities. Led by Hamburg, a well-balanced, competent partnership will position the EU as global leader in nature-based solution (NBS) innovation. CLEVER Cities applies a city centric approach, starting by key urban regeneration challenges and employing strong local partner clusters, to foster sustainable and socially inclusive urban regeneration locally, in Europe and globally. We will co-create, - implement, and -manage locally tailored NBS to deliver tangible social, environmental and economic improvements for urban regeneration. We are committed to make the interventions in front-runner cities (FR) cases for successful NBS and prepare robust replication roadmaps in fellow cities (FE), that also have NBS experience and expertise to offer. We will ensure long-term sustainability of actions in FR and FE by initiating urban innovation partnerships that will use SMART city principles to engage residents, establish new governance procedures, generate innovative financing and investment strategies. CLEVER Cities will employ partners’ large global networks to generate rapid and durable uptake of NBS by capacitating businesses and a CLEVER Solutions Basket with innovative technological, business, financing and governance solutions, in Europe and globally. The influential and committed FR will serve as role model for FE and global cities in East Asia and South America. All cities will actively engage in replication, thus, help to meet EU and UN sustainability goals and profile the EU as global leader in green innovation. CLEVER Cities materialises in strong local clusters around FR with partners, which can both support local co-creation as well as transversal activities with specific knowledge and expertise. This makes it a distinct, exciting project that will generate lasting results in cities and deliver a CLEVER Cities package with solutions, guidance and open-sourced data EU NBS reference framework.