This study explores how a community-driven design approach can address human flourishing in the context of mobility. Drawing on design ethnography and co-design in two Swedish urban areas, the study surfaces alternative design ideas rooted in everyday life and community values. The research contributes to design for social sustainability by illustrating how place-based, participatory processes can make room for local narratives and values, offering a pathway for embedding wellbeing into the design process.

Living Labs are collaborative, real-world environments for co-creating sustainable innovations that rely on trust-based engagement with local communities. However, while many studies emphasise scaling up or out of such innovations, the potential for achieving qualitative transformations in relation to local values (“scaling deep”) remains underexplored. In response, we adopted a design ethnographic approach that blended immersive, reflexive ethnographic methods with the participatory co-design characteristics of Living Labs. This approach involved closely partnering with a local community champion through participant observation and co-creation workshops embedded in the community’s daily life. Our findings show that community champions acted as co-creators and mediators, building trust and aligning Living Lab activities with local values through a relational ethic of care. By immersing the research team in day-to-day community life via shared activities and open dialogue, champions enabled situated learning about local needs, thereby facilitating “scaling deep” through mutual trust and understanding. Overall, the study demonstrates that scaling deep in Living Labs hinges on embodied researcher–community partnerships in mutual care and shared responsibility. The study contributes to the Living Lab literature by illustrating how community champions can bridge understanding about sustainable transformations through relational engagement. © 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

As mobility systems evolve, their design must enable people to adapt to disruptions in their daily lives and routines, making social resilience a vital yet underexplored focus. This is why this study investigates the question: What are the challenges when designing for social resilience in local mobility services? Semi-structured interviews with seven mobility experts revealed the need for a shift from prioritising organizational resources to enhancing social capacity, emphasising individuals’ strengths and established routines. The main challenges for urban planners and developers to achieve this were identified through a lack of guidelines for incorporating social sustainability into mobility planning, that in turn renders difficulties in employing qualitative methods tailored for enabling citizen and stakeholder engagement, as well as developing deeper understandings of local, social life. These findings are illustrated in this article through five design implications, each highlighting strategies to integrate social resilience into mobility systems, ensuring they are responsive and supportive of the communities they serve. © 2025 The Author(s)

Mental health issues are on the rise, and more healthcare resources are needed to address existing needs. The digitalization of mental health care can enable easier access to much-needed treatment. Still, little is known about how to successfully design digitalized health care, especially from a human–computer interaction perspective, even though digital mental healthcare options are currently available for healthcare seekers. The purpose of this article is to explore how currently available digital care apps are designed, outline design strategies used, and identify opportunities for improvement. In this article, we use design patterns from five digital healthcare center mobile applications in a design critique approach to explore digitalized self-triage journeys that are available to users in Sweden. We showcase the diverse design solutions through pre-patterns identified from digitalized self-triage steps of prelogin, selecting your health issue, answering questions, and filing a case. We then discuss identified design challenges in relation to (1) calibrating appropriate expectations, (2) health literacy requirements, (3) transparency of information, and (4) expected risk-taking behaviors. We end with implications for future design-oriented research to complement clinical, financial, and technological perspectives on digital mental healthcare centers and implications that can improve the design of digital self-triage for mental health applications.

Experiential learning through games is becoming increasingly relevant as games exert an enormous influence on the imaginarium of newer generations. This paper details the use of a game-based learning process focusing on game-making in relation to ethical issues of digitalization for graduate education in digital service innovation. Within the context of a masters education, students from diverse knowledge backgrounds learned about and reflected upon ethical issues related to social media usage by playing, remixing and designing games using the Design Games Framework. This paper illustrates that game-making can enable non-designer students to work with ethical issues. There are good possibilities to explore ethics through designing tabletop games, and having diverse groups of participants can be advantageous. Using a qualitative approach based on observation and interviews, the paper contributes to the body of literature focusing on experiential learning through game-based approaches and to the consolidation of the Design Games Framework.

This paper sets out to present an ongoing pedagogical project where game design is used to let students both learn and reflect upon different perspectives of ethics relevant to the master program they are enrolled in. The paper explains the underlying logic behind the pedagogical process where students develop their own game and at the same time learn about different perspectives of ethics in relation to courses that they are currently taking. With an open and iterative method, we let the students explore, discuss and design a game that can be used by future students. By letting the students decide and lead the development we democratize the learning-process and engage them in a learning experience. More so, this approach to game design as a pedagogical tool to engage and democratize the learning experience is new and increasingly relevant for both students that play games on an everyday basis, but also students that are new to games. Also, it is a constant and dynamic process for both students and teachers. © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.