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

2025-10-24

AI Summary

This study addresses persistent challenges in governing adolescent delinquency in Turin, Italy, by proposing a community-centered collaborative governance approach. Employing participatory design, it integrates knowledge from municipal authorities, law enforcement agencies, nonprofit organizations, and residents to co-develop the civic tool “Sbocciamo Torino,” comprising a data visualization dashboard, multi-tiered stakeholder advisory committees, and structured collaborative workshops. Its primary contribution lies in establishing an inclusive, iterative co-design framework that bridges institutional practices and lived community experiences—thereby enhancing cross-sectoral trust and data-informed decision-making capacity. Evaluation findings indicate strong stakeholder acceptance; however, critical barriers—including limited data literacy, persistent communication silos, and insufficient institutional support—were identified. Crucially, sustained political commitment and systematic institutional embedding were confirmed as essential prerequisites for long-term scalability and impact.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Solvers and Tools
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Coordination and Collaboration

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI

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.

Problem

• Co-designing civic tools to address youth deviance through multi-stakeholder collaboration
• Integrating data dashboards and participatory sessions for community-centered interventions
• Navigating wicked social problems via collaborative data analysis and institutional partnerships

Innovation

• Co-design process integrating multi-stakeholder collaboration
• Combining data dashboard with structured participatory sessions
• Community-centered methodology for collaborative intervention planning