The Thessaloniki Active & Healthy Ageing Living Lab (Thess-AHALL) has recently published a new paper on “Teaching university students co-creation and living lab methodologies through experiential learning activities and preparing them for RRI” (Evdokimos Konstantinidis, Despoina Petsani, Panagiotis D. Bamidis, Feb 2021). In this research work, published in the Health Informatics Journal (IF:2.93) is presented the methodology, followed to bring students closer to stakeholders and make them understand the value of co-creation in living labs. This is for an interesting approach, combining co-creation, experiential training & social innovation methodologies, developed by Thess-AHALL under the need for increasing interactive learning & deploying living lab methodologies towards the deep knowledge and understanding of stakeholders' needs and experiences, so as students to develop solutions, based on real requirements and not just on ideal potential use-case scenarios.

About this paper:

During the last decade, the living lab and co-creation concepts have started being blended with the Responsible Research and Innovation approach, aiming to evaluate potential societal anticipations toward fostering an inclusive RRI behavior. Teaching co-creation concept and living lab methodologies to university students has started been considered as valuable for future researchers along with the demand of companies and public sectors which turn toward user-center techniques for inspiration to develop innovative and services. To this end, the scientific publications presenting work on teaching co-creation and living lab methodologies are not so many while there are no published research studies on experiential learning activities for teaching co-creation and living lab approaches to university students. This study presents a course based on living labs and co-creation methodologies through experiential learning activities, consisted of four different lectures and an open event. The study involves stakeholders from the academia, the citizens, and the public sector. The results show that lectures with the participation of end-users were the most enjoyable. Furthermore, students thought that they learned the most when they first met the end-users. This lecture was perceived as a successful way to gain methodical knowledge for user-centered design and software development.

The HIJ is an open-access journal and the you can have full access to the paper, following the link here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1460458221991204