Process
Our project on Healthy Urban Living (HUL) is conducted in a Living Lab setting. The key characteristics of a Living Lab are to learn by experiment, integrating processes, and innovation. The starting point for innovation should be, the (end-) users' ideas, experiences, and knowledge, along with their daily needs for products, services, or applications. This description fits seamlessly in our HUL case to improve urban living environments. Since we have just started interviewing stakeholders and together in an experimental way figured out what our research objective should be. During the whole project, our case owners and citizens were considered as the experts. They had knowledge about measuring social health and knew the Kolenkitbuurt. We were mainly a facilitator to collect and integrate their visions, needs, and challenges. Lastly, dashboards that measure (social) health in specific neighborhoods are still in the development phase, so innovation is needed to improve it and bring it to the next level!
Our Living Lab consisted of plenty of steps in which we tried to figure out the needs of stakeholders, collected information, and finally made recommendations based on our findings. You can check out all the major steps we've taken in the section below.
STEP 1
Exploratory interviews to get a grasp of the topic. Interviews with the case onwers, municipality of Amsterdam, CBRE, and DE NIJS
STEP 2
Experts interviews with RIVM, Urban Sync, Tangram to set expectations and increase our knowledge on the case
STEP 3
Community session with the community managers to reflect on health indicators from DKH and Urban Sync in relation to Rhapsody
STEP 4
STEP 5
Modify and finalize our research question based on the outcomes of the community session. The decision to focus on social health
STEP 6
Co-design session with RIVM and Urban Sync to discuss results from community session, relevant indicators, and further project
STEP 7
Conduct street interviews with residents of the Kolenkitbuurt about the three main indicators from the co-design session
Analyze findings from the street interviews and conduct a literature study. Summarize the insights and design recommendations
STEP 8
STEP 9
Co-evaluate the findings with RIVM and Urban Sync for final remarks and modifications. Their input is processed in the final products
Present our findings, recommendations, and insights in the form of a written document and a presentation