Designing Physical Interaction Platforms

Physical interaction platforms (PIPs) such as living labs, innovation labs or co-working spaces serve as environments for ideas, experiments, and collaborative innovation. They play a key role in value creation by orchestrating ecosystem actors and facilitating interaction, e.g. the exchange of goods, services, or social currency such as information. This book explores how PIPs can be systematically designed. It adopts a platform perspective, focusing on value creation for manifold actors as a fundamental element for the sustainable operation of a platform. Well-established insights from the design of digital platforms are taken as a foundation and adapted to the physical world. This analysis is compiled of 4 major studies, structured along the lifecycle of a PIP. The first study explores design dimensions of PIPs as a basis for a design process. The second study explores the design process of a PIP itself. The third study explores sustainable innovation of PIP during later stages of their lifecycle. The fourth study applies the findings and models from studies 1-3 in a PIP design process and evaluates them. This book addresses both scholars and practitioners alike. The models and the knowledge generated contribute to the scholarly understanding of spaces for innovation and value creation while enabling designers to create sustainably successful and engaging PIPs.

Maximilian Perez Mengual works as a project lead for retail innovation. He received his PhD in information systems at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.