Good Life Ecosystems – Ethics and Responsibility in the Silver Market

Population ageing is creating challenges for societies to seek innovative ways and technologies to support home care. Amid fast-developing emerging technologies, there is a need for ways to ensure that technical solutions and services really serve the good of the individual and society, and thus promote the good life. In this paper, a practical ecosystem based design and assessment framework for ethically acceptable services for the silver economy is introduced. The framework is based on life-based design (LBD), a holistic design approach that stresses understanding about people’s life as the basis of the creation of design concepts, and on the idea of service and business ecosystems as a source of multi-dimensional value creation. We connect the ethical thinking and social responsibility aspects at the core of the ecosystem concept and analyse the dynamics of home care service ecosystems from the perspective of ethics and the good life. We suggest an iterative co-design process starting with identification of change needs in service production, followed by value mapping of services, and systematic analysis of the ethical issues related to the chosen services.