Abstract
Urban traffic environments in Busan, South Korea, often remain poorly adapted to the needs of children, despite infrastructure-based safety measures. This paper reports on a Living Lab project for co-creating safer school commuting environments through participatory service design. Researchers, elementary school students, parents, residents, and local authorities collaboratively identified critical issues, generated design ideas, and evaluated context-specific interventions. This paper synthesizes the Living Lab as both a methodological framework and a civic learning ecosystem by tracing how stakeholders’ perceptions, roles, and capacities evolved through iterative co-design, mapping, and prototyping activities. The findings highlight the potential of Living Labs to bridge institutional and citizen perspectives, empower children as co-designers of their environments, and foster social learning toward systemic urban safety. The paper discusses the role of design in facilitating intergenerational civic innovation and proposes a framework for applying Living Lab principles to policy-linked, child-centered urban design processes.
Keywords
living lab methodology; civic co-design; child-centred urban safety; participatory service design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1402
Citation
Lee, Y. (2026) Designing safer school routes in Busan, South Korea: Living Lab approach to child-centered traffic safety, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1402
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Designing safer school routes in Busan, South Korea: Living Lab approach to child-centered traffic safety
Urban traffic environments in Busan, South Korea, often remain poorly adapted to the needs of children, despite infrastructure-based safety measures. This paper reports on a Living Lab project for co-creating safer school commuting environments through participatory service design. Researchers, elementary school students, parents, residents, and local authorities collaboratively identified critical issues, generated design ideas, and evaluated context-specific interventions. This paper synthesizes the Living Lab as both a methodological framework and a civic learning ecosystem by tracing how stakeholders’ perceptions, roles, and capacities evolved through iterative co-design, mapping, and prototyping activities. The findings highlight the potential of Living Labs to bridge institutional and citizen perspectives, empower children as co-designers of their environments, and foster social learning toward systemic urban safety. The paper discusses the role of design in facilitating intergenerational civic innovation and proposes a framework for applying Living Lab principles to policy-linked, child-centered urban design processes.