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.

This paper examines Participatory Design (PD) as an epistemic practice that can strengthen how democratic institutions listen and respond to diverse forms of knowledge. Drawing on the PARliament Engagement project, it explores how creative approaches can reveal and reshape the interpretive practices that govern what counts as evidence in parliamentary scrutiny. The research was conducted through a participatory action research process involving ethnographic shadowing, interviews, and co-design workshops with parliamentary staff, creating opportunities for shared reflection on how knowledge is generated, interpreted, and used across scrutiny work. The paper develops the concept of institutional responsiveness to describe how PD can make interpretations of evidence visible, support organisational reflection, and build capacity for more inclusive and accountable decision-making. This positions PD not only as a method of engagement, but as a way of designing the infrastructures through which democratic institutions understand, evaluate, and respond to diverse forms of knowledge.

This paper describes a master’s thesis process in which systemic design

was used to explore how children with a different home language than the national

language can be supported. Using a systemic approach, this research maps the

complex network surrounding these families and identifies key leverage points:

valuing the home language, reducing pressure on the child, and strengthening

family integration. Through interviews, cultural probes, and co-creation with

professionals, insights were translated into a low-threshold product-service system

(PSS) embedded in the children’s living environment. The PSS encourages family

interaction and neighbourhood engagement through playful exploration. The

findings underscore the potential of systemic design in the public space,

highlighting its capacity to generate holistic, interconnected, and context-sensitive

interventions. The systemic analysis in this research uncovers contrasting

perspectives between stakeholder needs and governmental policies. This leads to

a discussion on how municipalities and social workers perceive systemic design.

Citizen participation initiatives often struggle to engage diverse communities meaningfully. 'In-between' spaces are celebrated as sites where power asymmetries can be renegotiated, yet this spatial metaphor obscures critical temporal dynamics. Through reflexive analysis of a ten-month design justice collaboration with Amsterdam's Stedelijk Team Participatie, this paper examines how temporal positioning shapes agency strategies within participatory processes. Applying temporal-relational agency theory, we identify a phenomenon we term "agency drift", the multidirectional movement across agency strategies as participants navigate institutional and community temporal orientations. Our findings show that making these temporal dynamics visible transforms in-between spaces from sites where drift simply happens into spaces where it can be intentionally cultivated. This research offers an analytical framework and design strategies to support diverse agency pathways and equitable engagement.

Citizen dialogues strive for inclusivity but often exclude marginalized groups. New participatory and creativity-based approaches are needed to be evaluated and become a part of the skillset repertoire for public officials to foster an inclusive dialogue. This paper reflects on photo-based conversations as a dialogic method for societal development and inclusion. The results show that the method provides possibilities to creatively involve participants, strengthen relationships and open a space for diverse narratives between different actors in society. However, the challenges of internal exclusion, lack of strategies for impact, and the need to build competence in handling conflicting stories, without depoliticizing discussions, must be addressed. This research contributes to design methods as drivers of public sector innovation by discussing how creative, participatory approaches can support inclusive dialogue in society. The results presented is part of a four-year research project aiming to enhance coordination between diverse actors and organizations in everyday landscapes.

Participatory Processes (PPs) are increasingly fostering broader civic engagement, strengthening dialogue and collaboration between citizens, the third sector and public institutions. However, a gap persists between participatory aspirations and their implementation, limiting the capacity of processes to generate durable transformations in local governance structures and public service innovation. Employing a qualitative-comparative methodology, based on stakeholder mapping and service-ecosystem lens, the study analyses four novel cases involving green and peri-urban transformations across diverse Italian regions. By operating under diverse administrative frameworks, they present fertile ground for illustrating complementary and mutually reinforcing PPs. Through a Service Design lens, recurring patterns and mechanisms of public-private co-management are analysed, highlighting the conditions that can enhance or constrain participatory efficacy. Given that participatory practices unfold across multiple interdependent dimensions and evolve over time, authors indicate that SD interventions have the potential to infrastructure-level systemic changes at both local and cross-regional scales.