This paper explores the role of toolkits and their material characteristics as a vehicle for generating impact through sustaining insights and ways of working from Living Labs. Using toolkits to sustain findings within Living Labs is not new, but literature concerning their characteristics and expectations by Living Lab actors is scarce. The paper outlines the primary role toolkits play concerning co-learning in Living Labs, how they can be designed through a reflective design ethnographic practice and highlights essential characteristics of toolkits when used to sustain findings into other contexts. This is done by reflecting on the design of two different toolkits focused on the design of future smart mobility services from a facilitator perspective, as well as interviewing stakeholders from the public and private sectors regarding their expectations of the role and characteristics of said toolkits.  

Urban Living Labs (ULL) is increasingly applied to tackle wicked design challenges in smart cities and smart mobility contexts. A persisting challenge for ULLs in urban contexts is creating engagement and scale research insights and design findings. Drawing on a case study concerned with the co-design of future mobility services where private and public sectors collaborated to explore future mobility in two different user communities, we explore co-design and scaling dynamics on the micro-level from a participatory infrastructure perspective. Based on the findings, we introduce the concepts of patching and cogitation. Cogitation is defined as a reflective state, which revolves around the act of embracing co-design methods and logic to address a design challenge. Patching is described as an activity that aids in scaling findings and insights from ULLs to support cogitation within the ULL, and the sustaining of findings into other contexts. We argue that the concepts of patching and cogitation can help researchers and practitioners understand the micro-dynamics of engaged co-design and scaling dynamics and provide support when planning, managing, and analysing participatory infrastructures such as ULLs. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The project Open and Self Organizing Mechanisms for Sustainable Mobility as a Service (OSMaaS) ran between 2020 and 2024, hosted by Halmstad University and funded by The Knowledge Foundation. The project was a collaboration between researchers from service design, design ethnography, business model innovation, and intelligent systems, and the companies Volvo Cars, WirelessCar, Polestar, and Devoteam. One of the project’s outputs is the OSMaaS Service Design Framework that integrates research from the different activities in the project into a toolkit for service designers. This booklet provides a guide for how to apply the framework. Each canvas can be used standalone or in any order, but our experience is that the framework is most powerful when following the design process presented here. The canvases can be downloaded from the OSMaaS webpage and are free to use. 

Human approaches to the future of urban mobility in everyday contexts are urgently required if we are to develop sustainable human futures in mobility. A requirement in meeting this challenge will be transdisciplinary and long-term engagement with a broad range of stakeholders and communities, in order to negotiate and align opportunities, values, and desires for social change (Fors et al., 2022). In this chapter we argue that we can address this challenge by applying participatory human approaches that place the values, everyday practices, and environments of people at the centre of design. The chapter presents the development of a participatory and design anthropological methodology for future urban mobility through a project involving sustained engagement with industry, municipalities, and local communities in Sweden. Based on two consecutive projects grounded in two contrasting suburban areas in Sweden and involving long-term, iterative multi-stakeholder collaborations, the chapter provides a transferable methodology for developing automated future mobility in diverse contexts, communities, and environments, through socially sustainable transformation. © 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Urban Living Labs (ULL) have become a common way to address wicked design challenges within the future mobility, and smart city context. The move toward ULL is part of a paradigm shift away from focusing purely on the IT-artifact, innovation, and user-centeredness toward focusing on the urban context and the construction of a place as a social context rather than implementation of a product or service in isolation.

This shift requires diverse sets of stakeholders with different backgrounds to come together to address wicked design challenges collaboratively tied to specific urban contexts. However, the change toward ULLs also brings unique qualities to collaborations. For example, it is often hard to generalize or transfer findings from one ULL to another. In addition, it requires new modes of thinking and acting concerning the value of bottomup approaches anchored in context.

Therefore, a core challenge for impactful work in an ULL, is to find ways to retain stakeholders’ local engagements and ways of doing collaborative design beyond the ULL project to create ripple effects. This thesis tweaks this challenge into a question that aims at investigating what a locally contextualized ULL set-up means for the involved stakeholders from a participatory perspective by asking: How can we understand engagement in ULL co-design, and how can this engagement be retained beyond the Living Lab? The question was explored through a design ethnographic approach in a ULL, where citizens, city representatives, car manufacturers, and representatives from public transport worked together to explore future mobility services. The research question is addressed through a description of how stakeholder engagement played out in the ULL along with an analysis of the dynamics of co-design as a co-appropriation process within the ULL, which enabled stakeholders to engage in a social context across sectors and disciplines to co-learn ways of appropriating findings from the ULL as an explorative way of working. Co-appropriation is described as a process moving from acclimatization towards cogitation in co-design, with patching as an activity that supports the process. The thesis also elaborates on how findings from a ULL can be retained and scaled beyond the Living Lab through transformation games, as an example of a patching activity.

The design space of future mobility services is considered a wicked problem, as many stakeholders from the public and private sectors need to collaborate to create sustainable future services. Recent years have shown a growing interest in utilizing urban living labs (ULL) and similar quadruple helix approaches toward addressing wicked design challenges. However, when engaging in co-creation through living labs, many actors also see potential in adapting methodology and new ways-of-doing, to appropriate it and improve readiness for tackling other wicked challenges. The article draws upon a ULL initiative in the mobility service context to explore the main challenges for ULL partners to retain the ways-of-doing that develops in co-creation activities. Through our study, we identified that cocreation needs to be grounded in the known, to facilitate search and co-appropriation of the unknown as key for retaining ways-of-doing in ULL initiatives.

It is hard to predict the impact of technology on society before it is developed enough. For example, the issue can be attributed to the need for more cross-sectoral collaboration in the design process. However, a solution for anticipating such outcomes has been proposed through the quadruple helix innovation model, which states that the involvement of government, academia, industry, and the public is essential in innovation systems. The question of how this collaboration can successfully be staged to foresee possible impacts is an empirical endeavour. This paper presents an iterative case study of how ethnographic material can be used to ongoingly tailor speculative co-creation to facilitate responsible innovation (RI) principles. The result is reflected through two lenses; the tools developed in the project to facilitate co-creation activities and the stakeholder reflections evoked through these tools.

It is hard to predict the impact of technology on society before it is developed enough. For example, the issue can be attributed to the need for more cross-sectoral collaboration in the design process. However, a solution for anticipating such outcomes has been proposed through the quadruple helix innovation model, which states that the involvement of government, academia, industry, and the public is essential in innovation systems. The question of how this collaboration can successfully be staged to foresee possible impacts is an empirical endeavour. This paper presents an iterative case study of how ethnographic material can be used to ongoingly tailor speculative co-creation to facilitate responsible innovation (RI) principles. The result is reflected through two lenses; the tools developed in the project to facilitate co-creation activities and the stakeholder reflections evoked through these tools. © 2023 29th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2023. All rights reserved.

The design space of Future Mobility Services is a wicked problem. Wicked problems are characterized by a high degree of uncertainty and many competing perspectives and interests that must be aligned in order to solve. Therefore, the design of future mobility services tends to require collaborations between private partners, the public sector, and citizens to come to fruition, often with competing goals and value systems. Recent years have shown a growing interest in using Living Lab methodology to address these types of wicked problems, and even though progress has been made, there still remains challenges concerning how to engage citizens in co-creation and alignment of stakeholders. This paper investigates how future workshops can be used to generate a framework rooted in the context of citizens, and how this framework can be used as a point of departure fo co-creation in multi-stakeholder settings in order to address wicked problems. The future workshops were organized in Sweden, in two communities which are seldomly emphasized in mobility service research; the first a peri-urban area on the outskirts of a large city and the second an urban area within a city with a heterogeneous set of citizens in terms of cultural background and income status. The framework was derived from an analysis highlighting Resilience, Opportunity and Community, as important themes to bring into the discussions when co-creating future mobility services. The framework, in turn, can then help in creating a bridge between citizens and align other stakeholders, when grounding work in a situated context. © 2022 The Author(s)

Managing successful digital innovation processes is a challenging task, especially when it involves heterogeneous actors with different sets of knowledge. By gaining a better understanding of how different architectural layers of digital technology interplay with digital innovation, we can be better prepared for managing the complex and messy processes that often arise when working with digital innovation. In this article, we therefore ask: How does the layered architecture of digital technology interplay with digital innovation processes? A case study approach was selected to studied events involving multiple actors in an innovation and development project called the Smart Lock project. The theoretical basis for our study is digital innovation from the perspective of knowledge exchange and relationships. A temporal bracketing strategy was used to support a process analysis of the case data. The article primarily contributes to the body of research concerning digital innovation and provides an example to practitioners of how digital innovation processes can be coordinated and managed based on the innovation at hand.