In recent years, ‘living lab (LL)’, a design approach that actively involves users as partners from the early stage of the design process, has been attracting much attention. Compared with the traditional participatory design or co-design approaches, one of the distinctive features of the LL approach is that the process of and opportunity for user participation tends to be long-term and complex. Thus, LL practitioners must appropriately plan and design effective integration of user participation into the design process to promote co-creation with users. In other words, LL practitioners are required to ‘configure user participation’ for the effective promotion of co-creation. However, to date, the knowledge on how to properly configure long-term and complex user participation in LLs has not been systematically clarified, nor have its methodologies been developed. This study develops a novel framework for configuring user participation in LLs. Through a literature review and analysis on LL case studies, we identified the 11 key elements in five categories that should be considered while configuring user participation in LLs. Furthermore, on the basis of the identified elements, we developed a novel framework for configuring user participation in LLs, which is called the participation blueprint. We have demonstrated its use and have also discussed its theoretical and practical contributions to the LL and co-design research community.

Although better diet quality is inversely related to the risk of geriatric disorders, the association of adherence to dietary guidelines with oral health-related quality of life (OHRQoL) is unclear. We aimed to investigate this association in older Japanese adults. This cross-sectional study included 7984 Japanese participants aged ≥ 65 years from the population-based Kyoto–Kameoka study. Dietary intake was estimated using a validated self-administered FFQ. The scores for adherence to the Japanese Food Guide Spinning Top (range: 0 (worst) to 80 (best)) were calculated. These scores were stratified into quartiles (Qs). Poor OHRQoL was defined as a score ≤ 50 using a 12-item Geriatric Oral Health Assessment Index. The OR and 95 % CI were calculated using multivariable logistic regression and the spline model. Higher adherence score was associated with a lower prevalence of poor OHRQoL (Q1–Q4:36·0 %, 32·1 %, 27·9 % and 25·1 %, respectively). An inverse association was found between the score for adherence to the food-based Japanese dietary guidelines and the OR of poor OHRQoL among all the participants (Q1: reference; Q2: OR, 0·87 (95 % CI: 0·75, 1·00); Q3: OR, 0·77 (95 % CI: 0·66, 0·90); Q4: OR, 0·72 (95 % CI: 0·62, 0·85); P for trend < 0·001). These relationships were similar to the results in the spline model. Higher adherence to the food-based Japanese dietary guidelines is inversely associated with the prevalence of poor OHRQoL in older adults. Our results may provide useful insights to improve and maintain oral health.

Al2O3 was deposited on silicon nanowire (SiNW) arrays by atomic layer deposition (ALD) as a passivation layer to reduce surface recombination velocity. As a result, effective minority carrier lifetime was improved from 1.82 to 26.2 μs. From this result, the relative low-surface recombination rate of 2.73 cm/s was obtained from a calculation using one-dimensional device simulation (PC1D). The performance of SiNW solar cells was also simulated by considering the surface recombination velocity on the side of SiNWs using two-dimensional device simulation. It was found that Al2O3 deposited by ALD can improve open-circuit voltage of SiNW solar cells even if the structure has a high-aspect ratio and large surface area. Therefore, improvement in the performance of SiNW solar cells can be expected.

The electrical characteristics of silicon nanowire (SiNW) solar cells with p-type hydrogenated amorphous silicon oxide (Eg=1.9 eV)/n-type SiNWs embedded in SiO2/n-type hydrogenated amorphous silicon (Eg=1.7 eV) structure have been investigated using a two-dimensional device simulator with taking the quantum size effects into account. The average bandgap of a SiNW embedded in SiO2 increased from 1.15 eV to 2.71 eV with decreasing the diameter from 10 nm to 1 nm due to the quantum size effect. It should be noted that under the sunlight with AM1.5G the open-circuit voltage (Voc) of SiNW solar cells also increased to 1.54 V with decreasing the diameter of the SiNWs to 1 nm. This result suggests that it is possible to enhance the Voc by the quantum size effect and a SiNW is a promising material for the all silicon tandem solar cells.