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.

This article introduces a process-oriented assessment methodology designed to address persistent challenges in Living Lab practice, such as lab-washing, social impact assessment, and assuring long-term, value-driven transformation and sustainability. Grounded in design ethnographic practice and embedding iterative and participatory engagements, the approach enables continuous reflection and adaptation rooted in reallife Living Lab contexts. Key methods – such as ethnographic deep dives, trading zones, Think Forward workshops, and assessment interviews – enable the identification of both intended and emergent social impacts while fostering community ownership and deep scaling. The article argues that embedding assessment throughout the lifecycle of a Living Lab enhances its credibility, strengthens collaboration across project streams, and better supports systemic change. In doing so, it offers a practical framework for moving beyond symbolic participation and toward authentic, context-sensitive transformation, specifically within EU-funded projects’ contexts.

In this article we advance a concept of future slow mobilities as a prism through which to consider the constitution of everyday mobilities futures characterised by care and guided by values of safety and inclusivity. In doing so, rather than drawing on a single project we demonstrate the benefits for a programmatic approach to research and design, whereby we focus on the findings of an expert participatory design futures workshop, which was built, part of and incorporated in-depth ethnographic, creative practice and documentary research. This constitutes a reframing practice, whereby our work highlights what it means to feel and connect to people, places and other species in slow mobilities. It illustrates a sustained response to dominant visions of seamless mobility futures which emphasise speed and the optimisation of time and financial resources, with supposed safety and efficiency outcomes, through the alternative frame of future slow mobilities. We thus contribute to innovations in design ethnographic and futures anthropological methodologies as well as advancing the slow mobilities concept through a futures focus. © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In recent years, the levels of e-commerce in the modern commercial environment have significantly increased, necessitating the adoption of measures and policies capable of complementing each other to achieve a sustainable urban freight transport system. Beyond traditional approaches, a new array of automation-based technologies has been developed offering dynamic, and reliable solutions. This research designs a next-generation multimodal last-mile delivery system of lunch boxes at the JRC campus, in Ispra, Italy, based on a service design approach that embraces three dimensions of engagement in participatory design for sustainable change; scoping, developing and scaling. Analytically, the “scoping” phase focuses on establishing and operating a living lab as a platform for co-design, fostering dialogue, shared understanding, and iterative learning among stakeholders. The “developing” phase involves mapping the service through user journeys and service blueprints while integrating digital practices. The “scaling” phase focuses on co-developing cooperative business models that generate value, manage resources effectively, and foster sustainable, community-driven networks. The pilot demonstrated significant operational improvements (droids navigated 77 % autonomously and sender waiting time averaged 5.17 % of the total journey), while 90 % of users rate the service as satisfactory or very satisfactory. However, the financial viability remains highly dependent on sponsorships and grants. © 2025 The Authors

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)

In this article, we interrogate the utility of conceptualising the ‘first and last mile’ (FLM) as a ‘challenge’ to be addressed through automated and integrated mobility services. We critically engage with the concept through a design anthropological approach which takes two steps so as: to complicate literatures that construct the FLM as a place where automated, service-based and micro-mobility innovations will engender sustainable modal choices above individual automobility; and to demonstrate how people’s situated mobility competencies and values, shape social and material realities and future imaginaries of everyday mobilities. To do so, we draw on ethnographic research into everyday mobility practices, meanings and imaginaries in a suburban neighbourhood in Sweden. We show how locally situated mobilities both challenge the spatial and temporal underpinnings of the first and last mile concept, and resist universalist technology-driven automation narratives. We argue that instead of attempting to bridge gaps in seemingly linear journeys through automated systems, there is a need to account for the practices, tensions and desires embedded in everyday mobilities. © 2023 The Author(s).

Co-creative activities are an essential part of a user-centred Urban Living Lab (ULL) approach that values integrating user perspectives into an iterative design process to ensure the successful implementation of an effective, sustainable solution with the potential for long-term impact. Maintaining a constant integration of user voices throughout the process is one of the main challenges of this approach, where user engagement activities risk operating in parallel to the technical development of the solutions. In this paper, we present co-creative filmmaking as a way to bridge the gap between users and developers, creating a channel of communication that allows users to express their needs in a more direct and accessible manner.  The step-by-step co-creative filmmaking method we describe is rooted in experiences of setting up ULLs in the GREEN-LOG project. It requires handing over control to the users for deciding what is filmed and how to film it; invites users to participate in the postproduction process; and overseeing the editing of the footage along with any additional material (including text, voice-over narration, animations, or any other digital effects). The goal is to provide opportunities for self-representation through audiovisual communication, to facilitate conversations between stakeholders across the ULL.  

Contemporary visions for automation of future society and everyday transportation in cities and society are based on accelerated innovations in emerging technology (Legacy et al. 2019). Whereas such anticipated social transformations are based on abstract and idealised imaginaries, they lack engagement with the everyday life, communities and environments into which they are to be implemented. In this paper, we argue that situated human approaches to the future of urban mobility in everyday contexts are urgently needed, through transdisciplinary and long-term engagement with a broad range of stakeholders and communities, in order to negotiate and align opportunities, values, and desires for sustainable social change (Fors et al. 2022, Smith 2022, Pink et al. 2022).

The paper demonstrates a design anthropological methodology for future urban mobility based on two consecutive projects involving sustained engagement with industry, municipalities, and local communities in Sweden (Smith et al. 2024; Brodersen et al. 2023, Ebbeson et al. 2024,). Grounded in two suburban areas in Sweden and involving long-term, iterative multi-stakeholder collaborations and co-design, we discuss how a transferable methodology for human futures in urban mobility can be used in diverse contexts, organisations and environments. We also present design anthropological tools for multi-stakeholder co-design developed through the project. We argue that such approaches can support the shift towards socially sustainable transformation at wider scales - hereby reimagining futures based on participatory human approaches that place the values, everyday practices, and environments of people at the centre of design.

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.