Conference Agenda

Urban traffic environments in Busan, South Korea, often remain poorly adapted to the needs of children, despite infrastructure-based safety measures. This paper reports on a Living Lab project for co-creating safer school commuting environments through participatory service design. Researchers, elementary school students, parents, residents, and local authorities collaboratively identified critical issues, generated design ideas, and evaluated context-specific interventions. This paper synthesizes the Living Lab as both a methodological framework and a civic learning ecosystem by tracing how stakeholders’ perceptions, roles, and capacities evolved through iterative co-design, mapping, and prototyping activities. The findings highlight the potential of Living Labs to bridge institutional and citizen perspectives, empower children as co-designers of their environments, and foster social learning toward systemic urban safety. The paper discusses the role of design in facilitating intergenerational civic innovation and proposes a framework for applying Living Lab principles to policy-linked, child-centered urban design processes.