Co-creating responsible tourism futures in a service prototyping environment

The relationship between co-creation and sustainability has been extensively discussed in the marketing and management literature over the last decades (e.g. Arnold, 2017; Biggemann, Williams & Kro, 2014; Peñaloza & Mish, 2011). Much of the discussion has focused on the process of value creation and the role of stakeholder knowledge, skills, and competencies as key resources in it. Indeed, when elaborating on the notion of value creation, Peñaloza and Venkatesh (2006) emphasize that value is socially constructed through market interactions and dialogues. According with this view, consumers and other stakeholder become co-creators who use their skills and knowledge to foster more sustainable market developments (Peñaloza & Mish, 2011). Thus, it can be argued that a sustainability perspective on co-creation requires the ability to think about how (and what type of) value should be created to support a sustainable future. Achieving this task requires new thinking, creativity, and innovations that promote a balance between economic, social and environmental objectives (Ferdig, 2010). The paper intends to contribute to the discussion on co-creation and sustainability by addressing the question of how the combination of service design and foresight thinking can help trigger future sustainability innovation. In so doing, we explore how value is co-created through actively designing and simulating sustainable future service concepts in prototyping workshops. To that end, we reflect on two different conceptualisation/service design processes in SINCO, a service prototyping environment. SINCO, which stands for Service Innovation Corner, is a service prototyping laboratory located at the Faculty of Art and Design of the University of Lapland, Finland. SINCO stresses a holistic approach to co-creation and user-experience-driven innovation activities. Data discussed here were collected in a Master level tourism course called “Designing Tourism Futures” in 2018 and 2019. The data consists of observations, documents and materials produced in the courses.