The current global economic system is driving an unsustainable society. The planet has limited resources, and the economic system exists within these limits. To move society towards sustainability, one must consider how to provide necessary services to a growing population while decreasing dependencies on resource consumption. This research aims to show that Collaborative Services offer one solution to communities by providing a platform for sharing and exchange of resources through innovation and participation. Collaborative Services are designed and utilized on a local scale, to meet specific community needs and have been found to provide Social, Natural, Human, Political, Cultural, Built and Financial Community Capital returns on investment. Successful Collaborative Services have certain ‘ingredients’ that guide them which include: leadership and vision, strategies to involve key stakeholders, organizational resilience considerations as well as financial, technical and physical supports for Collaborative Services. This research shows the benefits and ingredients of successful Collaborative Services, in order to promote their emergence and provide support for communities working with Collaborative Services. Using a strategic sustainable development lens this research suggests that Collaborative Services can act as a tool to pull communities towards sustainability.

I omställningsprocessen mot ett mer hållbart samhälle kan en designer ha en viktig roll för social innovation och samverkan. En designer kan underlätta för föreningar att själva lösa sina problem genom nerifrån-och-upp metoder. Detta betyder att den traditionella designerrollen är i förändring och att nya färdigheter efterfrågas. Det här projektet har utforskat ett praktiskt och föreningsdrivet designangreppssätt. Målet med designprocessen var att designa en tjänst för stadsodlingsprojekt baserade i Stockholm. Tjänsten utvecklades tillsammans med aktiva medlemmar i projekten för att göra odlingen mer effektiv, tillgänglig och enkel att sprida. / More and more, designers take the role of facilitators in social innovation processes by using collaborative approaches aiming at a transition towards sustainability. To do so, they collaborate with active communities that create solutions for their own problems through bottom-up approaches. Consequently, the role of professional designers is shifting and new design skills and approaches are required. This project explored a community driven design approach, on a practical level. The goal of the design process was to design a service for urban farming communities situated in Stockholm. This service was co created with members of the communities to make them more efficient, better accessible and easier to replicate.

The purpose of the study has been to execute an investigation on digital collaborative services, and their connections to onsite activities, throughout empirical experimentation, with a combined participatory design methodology and lab approach. The research focused on how an online platform, in addition to onsite events, could seed a public collaborative service. The chosen context for prototyping the service was the Rome’s library network, where during a phase of economic and job crisis, the library role is even more crucial, as one of the most locally active user centered services. The library wants to readdress its mediation ability towards educational activities who present an unsaturated potential, aimed at increasing users long term job potential and labour market orientation.
The workshops with local students, library staff, and local NGO, highlighted the need of an online platform in combination with onsite events, that could fill the main gaps that prevent the building of continuos relations with the users, adding a new core touchpoint will change the user experience of the current service, generating a new service flow.
The online and onsite service was tested in the month of July 2014, with 5 seminars, and a decent online participation, focusing on the main feature of the service: directly influence the service, to actively choosing its contents, the most voted events’ themes that become seminars.
The users are able to adapt the service to their personal needs, making the system modifiable, creating dialog between the users and the service, sharing many communal traits with a meta-design environment. 
The current state of the service prototype can not be considered a collaborative service, since the users can reach the role of co-designer - even if can be considered a social innovation project. However this service prototype has the potential to seed a transformation towards a public collaborative service. The user could gradually build a continuos relation to the service, as far as becoming a co-provider.

Dans le domaine du projet de conception-construction architecturale, la gestion de la collaboration entre les différents acteurs d'un projet est un enjeu important. D'un projet à un autre, en fonction du projet, mais aussi des acteurs qui y interviennent, les pratiques de travail varient. Parallèlement, de nombreux services sont proposés et utilisés pour assister la collaboration, certains sur un modèle « grand public » et d'autres plus orientés vers un usage professionnel. L'expérience CRTI-weB est un projet de développement d'un collecticiel mené avec et pour les professionnels du secteur au Luxembourg. Malgré l'étude des besoins métiers menée en amont du développement, l'outil présente cependant des manques d'adaptation. Ce constat d'inadaptation n'est pas un cas isolé, il reflète une lacune générale de ce genre d'outils à satisfaire pleinement les attentes des professionnels. C'est pourquoi ce travail doctoral propose un cadre d'analyse supporté par la modélisation des comportements des utilisateurs. Nous adoptons alors plusieurs points de vue relatifs à différents champs de recherches : le génie logiciel, la conception d'interfaces homme-machine, l'entreprise orientée services et la conception de système d'information, et enfin le travail collaboratif assisté par ordinateur (TCAO). Nous proposons la méthode PUSH (Practices and Usages based Services enHancement) qui orchestre ces différents points de vue et permet de générer un ensemble d'exigences pour le développement de services dits « adaptés ». Communication et traçabilité sont les maitres mots de cette méthode de conception. Le contexte d'étude à la fois orienté recherche et développement nous a permis d'évaluer et d'améliorer la définition des concepts mis en avant ainsi que la mise en place de la méthode PUSH à travers trois expérimentations / In the sector of the architectural design-construction project, the management of the collaboration between the different actors of a project is an important issue. From a project to another, considering the project type and also the actors involved, business practices vary. In parallel, many services are proposed and used to assist the collaboration, some of them being generic and others more specific to professional usage. The CRTI-weB experience is a groupware development project lead with and for professionals of the Luxembourgish sector. Despite the analysis of business needs lead before development, the tool has some lacks of adaptation. This statement isn't isolated; in general, this type of tools doesn't fully satisfy professionals' expectations. This doctoral work proposes an analysis framework supported by users' behaviors modeling. We adopt several viewpoints related to several research fields: software engineering, human-computer interactions design, service-oriented enterprise and information system design, and finally computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW We propose the PUSH method (Practice and Usages based Service enhancement) that orchestrates the different viewpoints to generate an amount of requirements for the development of adapted services. The communication and the traceability are supported by this design method. The context of study, both research and development-oriented (through the collaboration of the MAP-CRAI laboratory in Nancy and the CRP Henri Tudor in Luxembourg) allows us evaluating and enhancing the definition of our concepts and the applicability of the PUSH method through three experimentations