Expanding Usages of Earth Observation Data: A CO-Design Approach to Grow an Ecosystem of Efficient Service Designers

Earth Observation data has the potential to provide significant benefits to a large variety of socio-economic stakeholders. However, creating new usages of these data is particularly challenging as it requires connecting distant data and usages ecosystems. ‘Co-designing’ services based on Earth Observation data appears to be a promising path to overcome insufficiencies of ‘open-data’ strategies. However, in this challenging context, ‘co-design’ cannot be limited to the mere adjustment between user demands and data supply. Based on design theory, we propose a comprehensive framework for such a ‘co-design’ approach, aiming at growing an ecosystem of efficient service designers. It is experimented in the e-shape project. First results show that: (1) such co-design involves the implementation of a dynamic process of specific types of co-design actions, to unlock the different blocking points occurring in the growth of the ecosystem over time, (2) each co-design action aims at creating a ‘resilient fit’ between stakeholders.