Community Collaboration for product design (co-co design): an academic alternative for social innovation

Playlab, an educational initiative of the School of Architecture, Art and Design of the Tecnologico de Monterrey University, provides a steady academic base for innovation in product co-design adapting to changing social and cultural contexts. Play Lab aims to bring students from different disciplines together to tackle social challenges within a specific local community as a platform for social innovation and moving beyond the classroom into an established social community. The professors deploy a wide arrange of participatory and ethnographic tools from which students choose and implement in the specific community context. Thus the students have to go through a full and profound social and urban research of the chosen context before deciding on a viable collaboration design. Play Lab has had three iterations with different students in 2016, 2017 and 2018. This paper hopes to compile, compare and explain the processes and results of Play Lab while analyzing some variables as a reference. Using a methodology proposed by Hansson et al. (2011) we performed an evaluation of the aforementioned iterations. We believe we have gained clarity regarding future strategies, methods and tools to be further used in Play Lab, our academic alternative for social innovation.