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This paper aims to explore co-design as a method for actively involving young consumers in the design of an alcohol education program that utilizes an interactive Virtual Reality (VR) component.

Dietrich et al. (2017) six-step framework was applied to a co-design project involving four groups of 14- to 16-year-old Australian high school students. Data collection included observations by three facilitators, written feedback from members of each group and video presentations of the generated ideas. The data analysis focused on investigating the applicability of the six-step framework to young consumers and evaluating the quality and practicality of the generated ideas.

Sensitization is key to enabling young consumers to become equal participants during the co-design process. Sensitization allowed the participants to engage in the design task in a playful manner, which fostered active participation and creative insights during the co-design session. A team approach based on interactivity and group autonomy enabled adolescents to contribute insights into their specific needs and wants. This was complemented by a trusting environment and the presence of immediately available yet “hands off” facilitators.

The findings are limited to one specific sample and design task. Future research is required that investigates co-design with young consumers in different contexts.

This paper provides guidance for the application of co-design with young consumers by highlighting the importance of sensitization and facilitation.

This study marks one of the first approaches to co-designing alcohol education programs, including VR components, with young consumers. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the consequences of involving young consumers through co-design.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the conditions under which a co-design team comprised of in-house professionals and leading-edge service users can generate innovative service design concepts.

The investigation used a field-experimental design to conduct two studies. Observations and open-ended questionnaires were used to examine cross-comparison matrices with experts rating the generated outcomes and t-tests being used to compare the outcome ratings between teams of different compositions.

The outcomes produced by a co-design team seem to be linked to the team diversity – process facilitation relationship. Bringing a variety of knowledge and skills into the team can lead to original outcomes, while a high disparity between members’ backgrounds can require extensive efforts to facilitate a collaborative process. Separation between users’ objectives can result in a user-driven process and outcomes that are too specific for the broader marketplace. Co-design teams that characterize minimum separation, maximum variety, and moderate disparity are likely to produce the most promising results.

The research was restricted to a narrowly defined study setting and samples. Future research should replicate the current study in other service contexts using different team compositions.

Co-design requires the careful selection of users based on their background and motivations, as well as the facilitation of a process that enables the team to collaboratively transform relevant knowledge into innovative outcomes.

The research contributes to a better understanding of the team composition – process facilitation relationship affecting innovation outcomes. Doing so provides a more fine-grained picture of the co-design team composition and the facilitation requirements for service design.

This paper aims to investigate in a transformative service research (TSR) context how users can be involved through co-design and what contributions they can make during this process.

A six-step co-design process was used to plan and facilitate two co-design sessions that involved a total of 24 participants. The collected data include field notes, transcripts from group discussions, recordings of idea presentations and the evaluation of ideas.

A recruitment strategy that uses strong networks and sensitizes users through generating awareness of the underlying issue can prevent the waste of valuable resources. During the facilitation stage, experts need to find the fine line between close guidance and giving voice to the users. User-generated ideas set the starting point for new value propositions that more effectively support users in their value creation processes.

The findings are limited to one specific sample and design task. Future research is required that investigates the application of co-design to other TSR contexts.

In TSR, organizations will need to follow a different co-design approach owing to the sensitive nature of the design task and/or users that are not driven by innovation-related motivations. Organizations should tap into their networks to raise awareness and recruit suitable participants. To capture users’ unique insights and foster the collective creativity, facilitation should focus on enabling participants through the use of design tools and team management.

The study contributes new insights into requirements, challenges and benefits of applying co-design to TSR contexts. The study shows that ordinary users, if empowered, can give important insights into the design of new value propositions.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the usability of different design methods in understanding the customer experience from a contextual and systemic standpoint.

Three design methods (i.e. personas, observations and collaborative service mapping) were applied to analyze customer experiences in two service settings. These methods’ usability was compared across the two settings.

Personas, as informed by phenomenological interviews, provide insights into the customer’s broader lifeworld context. These insights assist in connecting with and understanding the customer experience from a dyadic customer-firm perspective. The involvement of the customer in service mapping activities supports the validation of findings and gives access to experience dimensions beyond the immediate service setting.

The analysis is limited to three design methods and is based on small samples. Future research should systematically review design methods to provide a basis for a more comprehensive evaluation.

To successfully capture the contextual and systemic nature of the customer experience, managers should apply interpretive approaches and actively involve selected customers as “experts of their experiences”. The study provides guidelines on how design methods can be combined and applied to a more holistic customer experience analysis.

The paper shows that design methods, when applied in a combined form, can support an analysis that captures both in-depth insights into the customer’s lifeworld and the complexity of value constellations.

This paper aims to develop and apply a service design method that allows for stronger recognition and integration of human activities into the front-end stages of the service design process.

Following a discussion of different service design perspectives and activity theory, the paper develops a method called activity-set mapping (ActS). ActS is applied to an exploratory service design project to demonstrate its use.

Three broad perspectives on service design are suggested: (1) the dyadic interaction, (2) the systemic interaction and (3) the customer activity perspectives. The ActS method draws on the latter perspective and focuses on the study of human activity sets. The application of ActS shows that the method can help identify and visualize sets of activities.

The ActS method opens new avenues for service design by zooming in on the micro level and capturing the set of activities linked to a desired goal achievement. However, the method is limited to activities reported by research participants and may exclude unconscious activities. Further research is needed to validate and refine the method.

The ActS method will help service designers explore activities in which humans engage to achieve a desired goal/end state.

The concept of “human activity set” is new to service research and opens analytical opportunities for service design. The ActS method contributes a visualization tool for identifying activity sets and uncovering the benefits, sacrifices and frequency of activities.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how vulnerable consumers can be involved in transformative service design and how this approach may enhance the design of such services. The study also analyzes how co-design with vulnerable consumers differs from existing user involvement processes with the purpose of developing a co-design framework.

A case study approach was employed, with six high schools in Australia identified as sites to conduct co-design sessions for a school-based alcohol education program. Adolescents were invited to review and (re)design an existing alcohol education program.

The study indicates that co-design with vulnerable consumers cannot be approached in the same way as conventional user involvement processes. Based on the insights generated from six co-design sessions as well as the examination of user involvement and co-design literature, the authors propose a six-step co-design framework. The six steps comprise resourcing, planning, recruiting, sensitizing, facilitation and evaluation.

The co-design framework illustrates important differences to conventional user involvement processes. However, the generalizability of the research findings is limited to a specific study setting and a narrowly defined sample. Future research in a different setting is needed to further validate the presented findings.

For service design practice, this study provides guidelines on how co-design activities with vulnerable consumers can be effectively resourced, planned, recruited, sensitized, facilitated and evaluated. The framework outlines how co-design may be applied so that vulnerable consumers can become empowered participants during the design process.

This research contributes to the knowledge in transformative service research – a priority in service research – and service design by extending the boundaries of our understanding of processes and tools for the involvement of vulnerable consumers in transformative service design.

Many firms use customer co-creation practices with the aim of benefiting from their customers’ knowledge, skills and resources. This paper aims to explore co-creation processes which involve users with different background characteristics and motivational drivers.

The study builds on an analysis of data from six teams in which users collaborated with in-house professionals for the development of new service concepts. Observations and open-ended questionnaires provided insights into the teams’ development processes. Independent experts rated the generated concepts. The data were analysed using cross-comparison matrices.

The findings suggest that the co-creation process and outcomes can be influenced by numerous intra-team factors, including relationship and task conflicts, participation style, team bonding, team identity and cohesiveness and intra-team collaboration. Their occurrence and influence seem to be linked with a specific team composition. A conceptual co-creation process model and six propositions are used to describe the complex relationships between team composition, intra-team factors and key innovation outcomes.

Research that investigates user involvement in teams needs to consider the complexity of intra-team factors affecting the development process and outcomes. The findings are limited to a specific setting, design task and user sample. Future research should replicate this study in different sectors.

Key to customer co-creation is the systematic recruitment of users based on their background characteristics and motivational drivers. For instance, the involvement of users with very specific innovation-related benefit expectations can cause conflict, leading to narrowly focused outcomes. This, however, can be mitigated by the form of facilitation and roles adopted by in-house professionals. Understanding intra-team dynamics can allow the firm to assemble and facilitate customer co-creation so that generated outcomes can align with set innovation targets.

This paper provides original insights into the “black box” of the customer co-creation process and the complex relationship between team composition, intra-team factors and key innovation outcomes.