olved in changing their ways of operating.
Integrating Design for All in Living Labs
The Integrating Design for All in Living Labs (IDeALL) project was developed as a response to this challenge. One of six projects co-financed under the European Commission’s Design-Driven Innovation programme, it aimed to bring the design and living lab communities closer together and to identify within these communities the best ways to innovate with users in different contexts. Led by the Cité du design in France, itself a design centre and living lab, the project consortium included design centres, living labs, educational institutions, and research centres, as well as the European Society of Concurrent Enterprising Network and the European Network of Living Labs. Among the living labs in the consortium and its supporting community were examples of the different types analysed by Leminen, Westerlund, and Nyström (2012) in this journal.
Responding to Vérilhac, Pallot, and Aragall's (2012) identification of "the lack of comparative studies on design methods involving users" as one of the barriers to "a more integrating approach of methods that could be used in a [living lab]", a comparative analysis of user-centred design methodologies was undertaken. The methodologies were compared using the following criteria:
- The phase of the development process (research/ideation/prototyping/evaluation)
- The duration of the methodology (short/medium/long)
- The user level of involvement (low/medium/high)
This analysis showed how the methodologies might be useful in different contexts according to different requirements and restrictions, and methodologies can be searched by these criteria on the IDeALL website. For example, a company wishing to develop a service might use the Service Innovation Corner methodology used by the University of Lapland or the Service Innovation and Design methodology from Laurea University of Applied Science. A company wishing to design and prototype a new product might use the Cité du design’s Laboratoire des Usages et Pratiques Innovants (LUPI; Innovative Use and Practice Laboratory) methodology, whereas a company wishing to shift to a more user-centred business model overall might consider Francesc Aragall’s HUMBLES method for user-centred business (Aragall & Montaña, 2012). In the subsections below, we describe some examples of these methodologies, which are summarized in Table 1.
Table 1. Summary of four example methodologies for user-centred design
1. Service Prototyping
1. Service prototyping (University of Lapland)
The Service Innovation Corner (SINCO) is a service prototyping lab at the University of Lapland in Rovaniemi, Finland. The SINCO lab helps visualise and concretize abstract services and experiences by using service design tools and prototyping methods. Service prototypes consist of pictures or videos that are projected to screens and also sounds, lights, and props (Figure 1). Service prototyping can be used in all stages of the design process but is especially valuable in the ideation or conceptualisation phase. The basic idea of prototyping is to concretize unclear ideas and to provide information for planning and decision making.
Figure 1. Users participating in a service prototyping exercise at the SINCO
The methodology has proven effective in the following case study:
2. 3H: Head, Heart, Hands-on (Citilab)
The 3H (Head, Heart, Hands-on) methodology uses the human body metaphor to describe a step-by-step user-driven innovation process. It is an open living lab methodology that has been specifically developed for the European CIP iCity project.
The methodology goes through three major phases of activity:
- Head: identifying and mapping the actors of the community innovation system to provide protocols and tools to collect and understand the needs and barriers to participate.
- Heart: consolidating all the relationships necessary to establish trust and commitment between all the stakeholders.
- Hands-on: engaging the participants in the co-creation and development activity in itself. The final part o