Designing towards institutional change in student housing: Service design amid competing logics in a public university ecosystem

As Milan’s universities compete globally for economic capital and student flows, they simultaneously face growing challenges in addressing the student housing affordability crisis. This paper presents a retrospective analysis of StudMIHome, a multi-disciplinary action-research project that investigated student housing conditions and prototyped an orientation and legal desk service at Politecnico di Milano. Drawing on institutional theory, it conceptualizes student housing as a liminal space shaped by conflicting institutional orders and examines how institutionally produced practices harming students emerge within student-market-university relations. These tensions expose the contradictions between two university models: the neoliberal, oriented towards performance and competitiveness, and the public, historically grounded in and responsible for democratic access. By examining the StudMIHome design process, the paper reflects on service design as a site of institutional reconciliation, understood as a provisional alignment within contradictory institutional orders that enables the coordination of actors and resources in the service of institutional change.