The Role of Service Design and Co-design in the Lifecycle of Online Communities: Cases from the Chinese Service Design Community

COVID-19 and technological advances have made online communication more common, which has increased the number of online communities. However, online communities tend to rise and fall rapidly, and maintaining active participants is vital to online community survival and development. While online communities connect many diverse participants, they also add to the complexity of the network and challenge participants to collaborate and participate. Despite the widespread use of service design and co-design for collaborating and participating in offline communities, there have been few studies examining their application and contribution online. This study uses participatory action research as a methodology. It takes China's online community, Chinese Service Design Community (CSDC), as a research object, analyses its development process from 2019 to 2022, and combines the online community life cycle proposed by Iriberri and Leroy as an analytical model to illustrate how service design and co-design activities can contribute to the community's transition from "inception" to "maturity" (Iriberri & Leroy, 2009). In addition, it also explores how service design and co-design can help to produce the ‘legacy’ for the long-term development of online communities by reflecting on the influences of the 'heroes' of online communities.