Forming energy communities and the governance structures needed to facilitate their development is proving more difficult than previously foreseen. This is evidenced by the rather uneven development of sustainable energy communities in Europe and beyond. Living labs offer a useful pathway for co-creating the dynamic renewable energy ecosystems needed to foster user-driven innovation, particularly with regards to integrating digital technology into the engagement practices of citizens in new energy communities. This paper uses the COM-B Model of behaviour to explore the potential of living labs in facilitating more active participation and co-creation among stakeholders, particularly in terms of integrating demand response strategies that foster collaborative end-user engagement. Indeed, it is this interplay between information and communication technology (ICT) and innovation which emerges from living labs that can empower participants to co-design solutions that are more responsive to real-world needs. Also, it should lead to fostering more sustainable changes in behaviour and improve the efficacy of the technical solutions available to us. This paper presents recent findings from multinational European research utilising the living lab model and the collaborative environment it provided for citizens to vision the types of participation they prioritise in bridging the gap between technological potential and user-centric innovation. Such collaborative, co-learning opportunities offer a means towards ensuring current ICT advancements align with the practical demands of the low-carbon societies we wish to create.

Cities face increasingly complex sustainability challenges that demand cross-sector collaboration, yet existing participatory tools rarely integrate internationally recognised sustainability frameworks with systems-based visualisation in a way that supports coordinated action across diverse stakeholders. This paper presents the Placemaking Maptivity, a card-based serious game that operationalises the ISO 37101 cross-analysis matrix—six sustainability purposes against twelve areas of action—as a shared analytical scaffold for participatory neighbourhood planning. Following a Design Science Research approach, this formative artefact-development study iteratively refined the tool through four rounds of beta testing in online, in-person, and mixed-stakeholder international configurations, drawing use cases from the EU-funded REEFLEX, PROBONO, and eFORT projects. Each game mechanic is traced to a defined learning objective using the Learning Mechanics–Game Mechanics (LM-GM) framework. Stakeholder feedback across iterations provides preliminary observations that the Maptivity supports identification of multi-purpose contributions, mapping of interdependencies, and collaborative prioritisation of next steps while highlighting facilitation, timing, and contextual adaptation as critical success factors. Whether the tool improves planning quality, learning outcomes, or decision-making effectiveness compared to alternative approaches remains a question for future, more rigorously designed evaluation studies. We discuss the formative character of these results, set out limitations, and propose a more rigorous summative evaluation protocol to support broader scaling and adoption of the methodology.