Context and Challenge

Supportiv is an online peer-to-peer mental health support service founded in 2018. It matches people with similar mental health struggles in online chatrooms. The chatrooms are moderated by trained human moderators to keep them troll free. The matching is done by a smart system that uses natural language processing. The participants type what is their struggle in a conversational interface and the technology matches them. The technology is patented by Supportiv. During the chats the moderators use the AI again to recommend customized self-help resources to the participants while they chat. …

By Gabriele Leonardi, Poli.Design lab


The city of Milan was facing a problem with public housing. First, there were a lot of underutilized spaces in and around the social housing complexes (e.g. basements, abandoned parks, etc.). Second, even though most of these housing complexes were located in rather central and functional areas of the city, there was a problem with social exclusion in these neighborhoods. Since the majority of public housing residents were low income people; a lot of them were immigrants that had not necessarily entered the country legally but have been living in these housings for many years and have always tried to…

Prototyping is an experimental process where designers implement ideas into tangible forms of varying degrees of fidelity to capture design concepts and test them with users. Prototypes allow designers to refine and validate designs quickly and without the huge investment costs associated with development of entire solutions. Most importantly, prototypes help learn from failures, receive feedback and incrementally polish the offerings to meet the ultimate user needs. Briefly put, prototyping is the blood of the entire design process — be it product, communication, system, experience, or service design.

However critical, prototyping is not always easy to implement in practice. When…


90% of the world’s goods transportation is seaborne and the share is projected to grow until 2030. This fact has lead to a rise in terms of container throughput. On the other hand, the shipping industry has always been focusing on ports and it has always been strictly reactive to demand unable to forecast it in advance. On average, 40% of the total shipping time ships spent waiting in ports, due to the current “first come — first served” slot allocation system.

Digitization that has revolutionized many industries for years could address some of the aforementioned issues in the logistic…



In November 2019, during a design fiction workshop conducted at Politecnico Di Milano, our cohort of graduate service design students got challenged to save the future of our humanity from a catastrophe.

We were given a fictional story called the “Milano Blackout”. The story was about a mysterious series of electricity breakdowns occurring in different cities around the world. According to the scenario, no one could explain the occurrence of the breakdowns and once they happened, no one knew for how long it would last. One of the cities affected by the breakdown was beautiful Milano. …

Sometimes, traditional research methods, such as surveys, focus groups, web analytics, diary studies, task analyses, etc. are not enough for product and service designers to understand the “Why’s” behind the users’ decisions and to get creative insights from the users to inform the design alternatives.

Frequently, traditional methods don’t uncover users’ motivations and problems fully. This might be attributed to the fact that the users themselves are not always fully aware of the reasons behind their behaviors, attitudes and opinions. Often, we, humans make choices, behave or react in certain ways because of past experiences and resulting prejudices embedded in…

Según un estudio de Twilio, una persona promedio tiene 3 aplicaciones de mensajería en la pantalla principal de su smartphone y usa 3 aplicaciones de mensajería diferentes por semana. El número está aumentando. La mensajería, aunque completamente habilitada por la tecnología, se ha convertido en una parte fundamental de la experiencia humana. Dentro de este contexto, comprender la experiencia conversacional y el diseño de la interfaz es de suma importancia. Los chatbots son un ejemplo de interfaces conversacionales que se utilizan cada vez más en múltiples contextos.

Source: Giphy

our era of intelligent machines, conversational interface design (e.g. chatbots, voice interfaces) has become a growing sub-field of human-computer interaction, where the medium changes from graphical elements (buttons and links) to human-like conversation (emotions and natural language).

Many conversational interfaces use advanced NLP (Natural Language Processing) in the background, while others are based on simple decision tree logic. Regardless of the type of the backend technology, there are certain points that conversational interface designers should keep in mind in order to optimize the users’ experience and maximize the value that the conversational interfaces that they design bring to the users.

According to a study by Twilio, an average person has 3 messaging apps on their smartphone home screen and uses 3 different messaging apps per week. The number is increasing. Messaging, though completely technology-enabled has become a fundamental part of human experience. Within this context understanding conversational experience and interface design is of utmost relevance. Chatbots are an example of conversational interfaces that are becoming more and more used in multiple contexts.

Understanding Chatbots

Chatbots are computer programs that conduct conversations via audio or text methods. They can be used for various purposes — from customer support to mental wellbeing assistance.


Nare K.

🤗Hey! I’m a service & UX designer & strategist passionate about data analytics and design thinking. Contact me at:

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