Keywords

1 Introduction

Social businesses to solve social problems are being widely focused on under the influence of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [1]. In a small city, it is getting more difficult from just the local government to solve social problems, and many private companies are entering the social business field. This seems that both government services and those from private companies are needed for sustainable societies. The government of the United States is improving government services by collaboration between a government organization, the U.S. Digital Service [2], and a private organization, the 18F [3]. The service improvement is based on the design thinking approach [4]. We believe that private companies will have a positive role in resolving the social issues by launching research into methodologies that can create sustainable services for a better society.

2 Living Lab

In order to effectively design social services, service design is famous as an effective approach to determining the value to be delivered to users and to reflect it in one or more services [5]. Living Lab is based on co-design with citizens in actual environments [6,7,8,9,10]. The concept of Living Lab was first proposed in the United States in the 1990s by Lasher et al. [11]. As shown in [12], we have investigated instances of Living Lab held in Japan and Scandinavia and analyzed their use-case data. One advantage of Living Lab is that it makes it easier for citizens to become motivated, and so work together in designing and creating the service that they really want to use sustainably. Figure 1 shows our vision of the society wherein sustainable services created by the Living Lab process are provided to citizens.

Fig. 1.
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Our vision of a society wherein sustainable services created by applying Living Lab are provided to citizens

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In Living Lab, the service provider starts talking to citizens directly before starting service planning to identify their issues. The provider then co-creates prototypes to resolve the issues, and tests those prototypes in the intended real-life context. Prototyping and testing are conducted again and again. The iterated testing allows the service provider to learn what is deemed necessary by citizens while the citizens acquire new visions of a better life. Through this Living Lab process, a service provider can create a service that citizens truly want and will continue to use.

3 Workshop with Citizens

The main key to a successful Living Lab is co-design with citizens. The typical approach to co-design coordination is a workshop. Unfortunately, citizens are not designers, so it is not assured that they can participate in the workshop effectively. For example, workshop participants may be negatively affected by the facilitator’s discussion control failures or by bad behavior of workshop participants such as upsetting the turn taking balance. In this study, we categorize problems in workshop with citizens in Table 1 and analyze them for exploring better designs for Living Lab.

Table 1. Categorization of workshop problems
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4 Questionnaire Survey

We submitted online questionnaires to one thousand citizens in Japan (20’s to 70’s, male = 578, female = 422) on how difficult they felt the workshop for co-design was. Those citizens were people registered with a database of an online survey company. To determine the types of those citizens regarding “interest in solving social problems”, we had those citizens respond to a pre-questionnaire consisting of 4 questions, PQ1 to PQ4, see Table 2.

Table 2. Questions in the pre-questionnaire
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Figure 2 shows the results for PQ1. The citizens fell into two types: mild positive and mild negative. Figure 3 shows the results of PQ2. Most citizens had no experience of a workshop. Regarding psychological factors and activities of citizens (PQ3), Fig. 4 shows that most respondents had a high sense of responsibility, cooperativeness, autonomy and understanding of others’ senses of values. Regarding a willingness to make a social contribution, Fig. 5 shows that the respondents expected the government and local communities, not non-profit organizations or commercial entities, to solve social problems.

Fig. 2.
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The results of PQ1: How strongly do you feel satisfaction with current government services?

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Fig. 3.
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The results of PQ2: Which social activity have you participated in?

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Fig. 4.
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The results of PQ3: How do you evaluate yourself in social situations?

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Fig. 5.
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The results of PQ4: How strongly do you want to contribute to solve social problems by indicating your opinion?

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We investigated how people felt about workshops in co-design of social services. In this investigation, we showed some pictures shown in Fig. 6 so that respondents of the questionnaires can imagine a scene of the workshop. First, we posed the question;

Fig. 6.
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The pictures shown so that respondents of questionnaires can imagine a scene of the workshop

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Q1: Do you want to join a workshop to co-design a service to solve social problems?

Figure 7 shows the results of Q1. Most respondents were negative about joining a workshop. In order to know the motivations of those who wanted to participate, we posed the following question;

Fig. 7.
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The results of Q1: Do you want to join workshops to co-design a service to solve social problems?

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Q2: Why do you want to join a workshop?

Figure 8 shows that the top two reasons were to contribute to society and secure a benefit for themselves. Next, in order to know why they did not want to join one, we posed the question;

Fig. 8.
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The results of Q2: Why do you want to join workshops? (N = 301)

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Q3: Why do you dislike the idea of joining a workshop?

Figure 9 shows the three main reasons for their reluctance: a waste of time, no interest, and lack of discussion skills. According to the categorization of workshop problems shown in Table 1, we posed the question;

Fig. 9.
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The results of Q3: Why do you dislike joining workshops? (N = 432)

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Q4: Which do you think is the most negative factor inhibiting a successful workshop?

As shown in Fig. 10, we found the following three problems were seen as hindering a workshop;

  • P1: Problems with the participant himself/herself.

  • P2: Problems with the facilitator.

  • P6: Problems with the topics targeted.

Fig. 10.
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The results of Q4: Which do you think is the most negative factor inhibiting successful workshops? (Please prioritize)

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5 Detailed Analyses

In order to identify, in detail, the reasons of underlying each of the workshop problems, P1 to P6, we conducted an additional questionnaire surveys as follows;

  • AQ1: What is the main factor creating problems with the participant himself/herself?

  • AQ2: What is the main factor creating problems with the facilitator?

  • AQ3: What is the main factor creating problems with other citizen participants?

  • AQ4: What is the main factor creating problems with participants from government or commercial entities?

  • AQ5: What is the main factor creating problems with the workshop environment?

  • AQ6: What is the main factor creating problems with the topics targeted?

The results of the above 6 additional questions are shown in Figs. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16. Figure 11 shows that citizens’ motivation in joining a workshop is strongly dependent on the topic (social problem) to be discussed at the workshop. Figure 12 shows that many aspects of the facilitator impact the respondent’s impression; poor skill in forming an opinion, poor skill of resolving an issue, poor skill in facilitating citizens to speak out, and self-assertive strong prejudicial comments that hinder the expression of citizens’ speech. Regarding the problems with other citizen participants, Fig. 13 shows that assertiveness, low flexibility in understanding others’ opinions, and no interest in the topic were raised. Regarding the participants from government or commercial entities, Fig. 14 shows that respondents were concerned about terms that citizens could not understand, and being biased by business interests as well as the above problems raised with regard to other citizen participants. Regarding the workshop environment, Fig. 15 shows that the respondents raised the following three problems; discussion flow, sorting out an issue, and time keeping. Regarding the topic targeted, Fig. 16 shows that respondents felt the following; unclear problem definition, excessive difficulty in solving the problem, unknown goal of discussion, confusion as to who would receive the benefit, and the benefit being surreptitiously directed to some unknown party.

Fig. 11.
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The results of AQ1: Which is the main factor behind problems with participants (himself/herself)?

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Fig. 12.
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The results of AQ2: Which is the main factor behind problems with facilitator?

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Fig. 13.
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The results of AQ3: Which is the main factor behind problems with other citizen participants?

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Fig. 14.
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The results of AQ4: Which is the main factor behind problems with participants from government or commercial entities?

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Fig. 15.
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The results of AQ5: Which is the main factor behind problems with workshop environment?

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Fig. 16.
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The results of AQ6: Which is the main factor behind problems of targeted topic?

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Finally, in order to investigate the possibility of solving social problems by a holding workshop among citizens, a government and commercial entities, we posed the following question;

Q: Do you think that social problems can be solved by a workshop among citizens, and government and commercial entities?

As shown in Fig. 17, we found that the respondents had low expectations of solutions coming from government or commercial entities. This is due to the following problems; too systematic discussion style, no passion in discussion, making use of citizens, and making money (see Fig. 18).

Fig. 17.
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The results of Q: Do you think that social problems can be solved by workshops among citizens, a government and commercial entities?

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Fig. 18.
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The results of additional AQ4: How do you feel about participants from a government or commercial entities?

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6 Discussion

As shown by the responses to the above questionnaires, workshops involving citizens and government and commercial entities face many kinds of problems. To tackle the difficulties posed by co-designing with citizens, two partial solutions seem likely; one is utilization of technology tools and other is evidence data. In most cases, the success of Living Lab projects strongly depends on individual facilitation skills. It would be very effective to be able to extract and transfer the skills of talented facilitators, to generalize them, and to reflect them in technology tools. Regarding the technology tools, we focused on the following three important functions; process management, streamlining of design processes, and encouragement of participant engagement. We developed a booklet to provide instruction in performing each service design process. The booklet provides novice designers with know-how about “What should I do?” to overcome the types of difficulties raised in the service design processes. With regard to the participants’ engagement, we conducted a small Living Lab project where we tried to create an effective service for a community at a disaster recovery public housing complex [13]. The project revealed the importance of presenting many small ideas to citizens. This is because we could extract common factors from citizens’ feedback to the many ideas. Note that humorous ideas are needed to relax the citizens enough that they can express their own opinion about the presented ideas. We intend to develop some tools for extracting common factors and generating humorous ideas.

Regarding the evidence data, we focused on utilizing archives of related data and the life logs of citizens. In the service design processes, workshop participants have to make a decision as a group to move forward/backward to the next/previous process. However, each participant may have a different opinion and sometimes they cannot convince the other participants. For example, in deciding which social problem to solve, some will focus on disaster relief while others will focus on the environment. An archive of fact data could help to convince not only other participants but also themselves. For example, it could be effective to present visualized archived data in a shared space while the workshop is in progress. Life logs of citizens such as daily GPS logs are fact data that are very persuasive in convincing participants because they are facts of their own activities. Daily life logs may allow familiar problems to be solved.

Another approach to a successful Living Lab, as an alternative to a workshop with citizens, is utilizing the knowledge acquired by social workers who know the problems that citizens are facing. Social workers care about the daily life of each citizen, so they know the background of the problems such as a trouble with family, physical/mental disability etc. A support tool based on a database of such social workers’ knowledge or skills could be effective in solving the problems that citizens have.

7 Contribution to HCI Fields

Finally, as our future contribution to the fields of HCI, we discuss the potential of computation-supported (such as artificial intelligence) Living Lab. One possible utilization of HCI technologies to Living Lab is to support the interaction between participants in co-design by the use of tools or data such as the decision making support mentioned above. Each process in service design is based on analog methods including the facilitator’s skills. As mentioned above, some technology tools may help workshop participants in the design processes. For example, a decision making support technology based on artificial intelligence may cover those areas that humans are not good at. For example, automatic evidence data pick-up technology based on artificial intelligence may help workshop participants while the facilitator can understand each participant’s emotion and/or sense of values.

8 Related Work

A Living Lab approach is used in several areas. French et al. explored the implementation of Living Lab as a teaching approach in an undergraduate computer science curriculum for innovative thinking [14]. The results showed that Living Lab is effective for students who are not designers. Morgan’s paper [15] describes how initial workshops are informing an ongoing process of co-development within two different Living Labs wherein people from public sectors are engaged. Ogonowski et al. highlighted several aspects of Living Lab: the selection of participants, maintenance of participants’ motivation, establishment of a trust relationship, and the coordination of collaboration [16]. In Molinari’s paper [17], Living Lab is assimilated to multi-stakeholder platforms of Public Private People Partnership. In Sandoval-Almazan’s project, Living Lab is used for open innovation of public officials [18]. The project resulted that an innovation process requires a preliminary stage of building trust between governments and citizens. Schelle et al. have studied how to enhance user engagement in creative workshops by a tool [19]. Abel et al. focused on utilizing data in a Living Lab setting [20].

9 Conclusion

Our detailed questionnaires indicated that several workshop issues such as lack of facilitator’s skills, behavior of workshop participants, etc. may negatively affect the attendees’ impression of the workshop. From the questionnaire results we identified human factors such as willingness for social contribution, motivation for workshop participation, fundamental psychological features, dissatisfaction with government support, etc. Future work will include a design framework to employ technologies and data to enhance the Living Lab process.