City of the Future Living Lab believes that it is essential for the end user to participate to the creative phases of technological innovation in order to deploy services that can contribute tangibly to promote healthier and more eco-sustainable individual and collective lifestyles. This process is called Co-Creation.
This collaborative approach to technology and service innovation goes hand in hand with what is called User-driven Open Innovation, or the process of innovation that is channeled directly from the user experience and that is open to the exchange of interdisciplinary knowledge between scientific communities, SMEs, large companies and institutions.
The Co-Creation process can be broken down into 4 phases:
Co-design:
A process where the end user is involved throughout the ideation and first development of a concept. Users
have a proactive role and are invited to participate to a great number of different activities with the aim of
generating ideas regarding products, interfaces or services.
Implementation:
The phase where user and system requirements are defined and prototypes are developed. This is when
the ideas from the Co-Design phase are refined and analyzed from a technological, ergonomic, mechanic
and structural perspective.
Experimentation:
The moment in which the prototypes developed during the Implementation phase are delivered to the end
user to experiment with. The research team observes users, collects data and measures the way in which
they interact with the product, interface or service in question (via ICT as well as ethnographic studies) in
real-life settings. The Implementation phase and Experimentation phase are part of an iterative process
where the information collected from the latter are fed back
into the former, in a cyclical concept refinement process.
Evaluation:
This phase regards the validation of the product/interface/service in question. The insights and data
gathered and derived from the Experimentationphase are used to assess the concept from a cognitive,
emotional, functional, mechanical, material, usable and engineering point of view.
Our Living Lab’s ecosystem
