Citizen Involvement in Service Co-creation in Urban Living Labs

Abstract

Urban Living Lab (ULL) is a living lab in which citizens and companies collaborate to create services for solving problems in a city or region. In ULLs, a variety of citizens participate in a long-term co-creation process including design activities such as concept creation, development, and testing. Unfortunately, few studies have provided useful knowledge about or insights into how to effectively involve citizens with diverse characteristics in such co-creation processes. In this paper, we present a case study illustrating how to involve various citizens in the long-term co-creative design process in ULLs. In this study, we first analyze our ULL project and clarify the various roles that citizens may perform in the co-creation process. Then, on the basis of the analysis results as well as our hands-on experiences, we provide key insights into obtaining effective citizen involvement in ULLs, which should be helpful to other practitioners and researchers.