Experience Media Model: A Method to Facilitate the Consistent Bottom-up Innovation in Community Co-creation

Abstract: Co-creation is becoming a more common and essential method to deal with complex systematic problems in the community, a critical issue in social innovation. However, due to the perishability of co-creation, it is challenging to consistently facilitate the bottom-up innovation of participators. Perishability means that the co-creation results cannot be well saved and cannot have sustainable impacts on participators, such as emotional links, social interactions, and real-time talks. Towards this end, we introduce the theory of communication study into the social innovation area. According to the Malezek Mass Communication System Model and the Verkehr Theory, we deconstruct a co-creation event as a social information system and regard the traditional design touchpoints as the media touchpoints which can affect the communication process among participators during the co-creation. By combining the co-creation logic (named the Execution Co-creation Layer) from service design with the communication logic (named the Media Co-creation Layer) from the social media area, we aim to construct a new model named the Experience Media Model (EMM) to optimize the problem. EMM is a top model to help the community co-creation organizers systematically comp the information flow and adjust, delete, or create some media touchpoints to get better and consistent bottom-up innovation results after the co-creation. In addition, EMM was evaluated, verified, and iterated by applying it in a practical community co-creation project named NICE2035 Art Co-Mural, No.169 Fuxin Road, Yangpu District, Shanghai, China, where more than 200 residents were involved offline, and more than 100,000 people were involved online. Moreover, we conducted interviews, comments reviews, and media data analysis to get further feedback and insights from participators. In conclusion, we argue that the EMM can be a method to facilitate consistent bottom-up innovation in community co-creation, and we hope that this article has a specific enlightening value for later researchers.

Keywords: Co, creation, Service Design, Experience Media, Communication, Bottom, up Innovation

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1003690

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