Transforming Service Design and Big data Technologies into Sustainable Urbanisation  

This project was jointly funded by British Council (BC) and National Natural Sciences Found of China) under the BC’s Researcher LINKs workshop grants.

This workshop was supported by a Researcher Links, grant, ID [2016-RLWK7-10246], under the Newton-China Fund partnership. The grant is funded by the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and National Natural Sciences Foundation of China (NSFC) and delivered by the British Council.  The workshop was held on June 27-29, 2017 in Newcastle.

Northumbria University and the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS), organised the workshop in School of Design, Northumbria University at Newcastle upon Type on June 27-29, 2017.  The workshop was coordinated by Professor Shengfeng Qin at Northumbria University and Professor Cuixia Ma at ISCAS, and mentored by: Professor Robert Young in Service Design and Professor Keith Shaw in Sustainable City.

The project was focused on sustainable urbanization with the best services for various urban populations to access essential resources easily and on a sustainable basis. To meet the challenge, there is a need to design and make smart service recommendations for citizens utilising Big-data technologies, and to give them sustainable access to services. Thus, transforming service design and Big-data technologies into sustainable urbanization infrastructures is both timely and important. The challenges are addressed in our workshop with six topics.

• Primarily, how to design proper services for urbanization

• Exploring good examples of urban healthcare systems and services

• Discussing Big-data based service recommendation technologies for delivering desirable services

• How to make essential resources and services in the city sustainably accessible to all

• How to improve the quality of research and disseminate research results in this context

• How to establish longer term researcher collaborations