Evaluating impact of co-creation Workshop organisers:
Outcome:
Mathilda Tham, Sarah Hyltén-Cavallius, Hiroko Akiyama, Angelika Thelin from Småland Living Lab, Transnational Living Lab for Active Ageing
The workshop, in the main, delivered on its aims. The workshop also showed that although there is a keen interest in evaluation of impact, this is not a mature discourse in the living lab community. Despite the existence of some frameworks and the importance of working with indicators for impact, the practical reality of this needs more work.
Description: The overall aim of the workshop was to explore how to evaluate impact of cocreation. Complexities include: 1. showing impact to different stakeholders; 2. requirements to standardise measures, at the same time as we need original and situated approaches, and 3. the range of purposes of co-creation, e.g. informative, generative and transformative. (See Tham, 2008)
Aim:
Value for participants: The participants benefited from engagement with the concepts of evaluation, indicators, impact in the specific context of living labs, and the particular workshop. This is a theme that sparks curiosity, discussion, debate. Participants also appreciated the particular way of working, which is systemic and holistic.
The workshop aimed at gaining: • insights into comparing and mapping different evaluative frameworks in the specific context of an intervention to reduce experience of loneliness. • ideas for new approaches to evaluation in the specific context of social design and wellbeing/quality of life. We also anticipated that the workshop would take us further in capturing and communicating elusive emotional benefits of living lab approaches.
Methodology: The workshop employed a specific workshop, Languaging Loneliness, as case. Participants got a taster experience of this, and then went on to use this experience as basis for evaluation of co-creation. In this workshop we merged artistic and scientific approaches, employing the overarching framework of metadesign. We gave participants a tricky task – at times confusing, because of the layers of subjects of evaluation.
Surprising Insights: Language differences were clearly an issue. In the future, more time will be dedicated to ascertaining common ground when it comes to vocabulary, and the range of purposes of living labs, as well as to what extent a process can also be a product.
Next steps: The next step will be to continue the work on evaluation of impact in the real living lab context, as well as liaising with the work of other labs. We will be working with different stakeholder groups to define suitable indicators. We hope to present step 2 at the next conference.
33