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Buildings shape cities as those cities grow from and nurture people living and working within the built environment. Thus, the conceptualization of smart building should be brought closer to the smart city initiatives that particularly target ensuring and enhancing the sustainability and quality of urban life. In this paper, we propose that a smart building should be interlinked with a smart city surrounding it; it should provide good experiences to its various occupants and it should be in an ongoing state of evolving as an ecosystem, wherein different stakeholders can join to co-produce, co-provide and co-consume services. Smart buildings require a versatile set of smart services based on digital solutions, solutions in the built environment and human activities. We conducted a multiphase collaborative study on new service opportunities guided by a Design Thinking approach. The approach brought people, technology, and business perspectives together and resulted in key service opportunities that have the potential to make the buildings smart and provide enjoyable experience to the occupants who support their living and working activities in smart cities. This paper provides the resulting practical implications as well as proposes future avenues for research.

In this paper we present recent cases where human-centered designers apply empathic design approaches for public service development. The public service development nowadays involves a complex network in which multiple organizations from different sector need to collaborate in order to provide more holistic and effective solutions for citizens. Collaboration in this complex network, however, is yet very challenging. In this paper, we explore the mindset and tools of empathic design as a potential approach to overcome this challenge. Based on two pilot projects carried out with a large municipality in Finland, we shed light on opportunities of empathic design in three aspects: firstly, in helping service developers see a holistic picture of the complex service structure and at the same time view it from individual actors’ perspectives; secondly, in engaging various actors in face-to-face dialogues and achieving a mutual understanding; lastly, in envisioning new ways of working in organizations through the small-scale experiments. These findings indicate new roles of empathic design for creating collaborative relationships in service networks. Discussions in this paper also include challenges of doing empathic design in public organizations.