Patterns for Living Lab Practice: Describing Key Know-How to Promote Service Co-Creation with Users

Abstract

“Value co-creation” among actors related to service provision is one of the key concepts in service design. Living Lab (LL) is a co-creative service design methodology in which designers and users collaboratively design services. In LL, users are actively involved in service design processes over long periods. Because LL is a design methodology based on long-term co-creation with users, its practices involve more direct and indirect communication and collaboration with users than typical service design does. Therefore, in order to make value co-creation successful in LL projects, it is crucial for designers to use not only knowledge of service design methods, but also practical know-how related to “facilitating long-term co-creation with users.” Such know-how is not always shared, however, among LL practitioners, because it is often buried in their experiences. Thus, LL practice currently places heavy reliance on the practitioners’ intuition and experience. Therefore, to support LL practitioners, it is essential to extract key know-how on how to achieve successful LL projects from experienced practitioners, and to describe such know-how. This would allow us to share and reuse know-how in planning and running an LL project. Hence, the purpose of this study is to extract such key know-how for LL practice and describe it in an easy-to-reuse manner. We first developed a workshop to extract key know-how for LL practice. In this study, we held the workshop twice and could extract 30 items of key know-how. Subsequently, we described the extracted key know-how as “patterns” by using the pattern language framework, and we developed a booklet listing the 30 patterns in an easy-to-reuse manner. The booklet can be used by LL practitioners to refer to and reuse the key know-how for LL practice. Through an evaluation, we confirmed that the developed booklet is useful for LL practitioners for referring to and using LL know-how.

Adopting the service system view toward successful implementation of assistive technologies

“…According to the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), living labs are “open innovation ecosystems in real‐life environments using iterative feedback processes throughout a lifecycle approach of an innovation to create sustainable impact.” 52 This definition shows a clear linkage to the SSV and the aforementioned approaches regarding participation in innovation/design, iterative processes and ecosystems, implying the involvement of multiple stakeholders and real situations/interactions. Indeed, living lab is a “co‐creative service design methodology.” 53 Yasuoka et al 54 . showed it as a cyclical process entailing idea creation, prototyping and user testing.…”

“…Indeed, living lab is a "co-creative service design methodology." 53 Yasuoka et al 54 showed it as a cyclical process entailing idea creation, prototyping and user testing. Akasaka et al 55 further highlighted three features of the living lab method, including "testing in a real-life environment or a similar environment," "involving users from the early to late stages of the process" and a "long-term design process.…”

How To Transfer Tacit Knowledge for Living Lab Practice Consideration on Tacit Knowledge Representations

“…Aiming at transferring tacit knowledge for living lab practice to wider practitioners, the authors conducted a series of experiments, in which practitioners' experiences were collectively extracted and externalized [32], [33](Step 1). The process was conducted through two workshops for collecting tacit knowledge for living lab practice, and an analysis session.…”

“…The depicted knowledge was finally externalized in a form of three different representations and evaluated (Step 2). The Step 1, the knowledge extraction process in workshops and analysis were reported previously in a conference [32], [33], so that in this article, only the basic frame and result will be presented.…”

Living Lab for Citizens’ Wellness: A Case of Maintaining and Improving a Healthy Diet under the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The programme design comprises one of the features. While initiatives for the use of living labs have started in various places-mostly based on high expectations-there is no clear and unified definition, and, in Japan, in particular, knowledge has not been systematically organised [49]. Additionally, there is a concern that even if a long-term vision is shared, it may not meet short-term expectations because of power issues among stakeholders and the reluctance of end-users, given the wide range of stakeholders [50].…”