Towards platform-based co-design: reconciling contextualization and the design of genericity through retrofit
Résumé
This study explores the challenges related to platform emergence through the lens of co-design. We focus on the double edge challenge of generification, which implies to foster both the contextualization of the platform resources and their genericity. We hypothesize co-design to be a consistent approach to conciliate these two diverging issues through ‘retrofit’. Thus, we address the following research question: how co-design practices can foster retrofit at the technical, organizational, and cognitive levels? Following an intervention-research approach, we built a case study centered on the application of an emerging data-platform focused on Earth Observation for the development of digital services for the city of Marseille. We show that co-design can foster synchronously contextualization and genericity as we identified a specific structure of co-design sessions to support contextualization as well as three mechanisms to enact retrofit towards genericity over the course of contextualization. Thereby, we contribute to platform and co-design literature, but also more fundamentally to the design theories as we unveil the degree of genericity as a consistent dimension to structure the solution and problem spaces.