The benefits and challenges of co-creation with seniors: an interdisciplinary social innovation project designed to improve quality of life

The Senior Living Lab has run a number of participatory workshops with seniors with a view to brainstorming and developing products and services to improve the quality of life of ageing populations in Switzerland. This project aims to combine and adapt design thinking and living lab methodologies to be suitable with elderly participants. It gathers various qualitative techniques and deploys an interdisciplinary methodology based on community-based participatory research. This living lab project highlights the key success factors and the challenges in order to successfully involve seniors during complex innovation processes, such as time essential to tackle logistic issues and the ability to adapt participatory initiatives to an elderly public.