Co-design and Interaction design to approach urban issues inside Urban Living Labs : The LOOPER Project in Verona

This paper aims to explain how the Co-Design practice can be implemented using Interaction Design and how, applied within Urban Living Labs (ULL), this can improve the decision process for designing better urban spaces. The experience that will be described is expanded inside the framework of the LOOPER project (Learning Loops in the Public Realm), co-founded under the JPI Urban Europe program. Here it will be analysed the case study of Verona in Italy, where stakeholders (citizens and policymakers) are called to work on the theme of air and noise pollution: they will have to analyse problems, via co-monitoring activities, and to propose design solution, like mitigation measures. The aim is to apply Co-Design approach to solve urban issues and it will be strengthen using the Learning Loop, which means that participants will be called to evaluate the work they will do. Another goal of the project is to implement the Co-Design process using different strategies of Interaction Design to share and visualize spatial analysis results and all the possible design solutions. As different tools will be used, both existent and created for the LOOPER project, lot of attention has to be put in how to make these instruments as user-friendly as possible to meet the different age range, cultural levels and skills of ULL participants.