Januray 18, 2025 At a design conference in Italy 2023, I discovered The Design of Tactics: Critical Practices Transforming Public Spaces, edited by Francesca Gotti, Jacopo Leveratto, and Cristina F. Colombo (published by DPR-barcelona). With some leisure time during the long weekend on campus, I immersed myself in its thought-provoking content. The book presents a series of case studies from contemporary European cities, exploring how marginalized and neglected public spaces can be revitalized through tactical interventions, co-creation practices, and ethnographic research. These approaches aim to foster meaningful encounters between people and cultures, ultimately enhancing the quality of urban living. This examination of human connections, relationships, and culture brought to mind the service encounter experiment in the Design for Longevity (D4L) project (Lee et al., 2025), which explored interactions between service providers (e.g., longevity coaches or financial advisors) and participants (e.g., clients or users). Extending this concept to encompass culture and public spaces adds layers of complexity but also opens up profound opportunities. Modern cities are increasingly characterized by “in-between” spaces—those transitional or undefined areas that challenge traditional urban typologies and frameworks, including settlement principles, planning scales, and design agencies (P185). This invites us to reconsider and redefine the evolving roles and interpretations of the “third space.” The discussion resonates with Booms and Bitner’s (1981) servicescape framework, which examines how the physical environment and artifacts can potentially shape and reshape service processes and people’s interactions. Incorporating cultural dimensions into this framework encourages more sophisticated dialogue and layered engagement between people and spaces, enabling them to adapt to dynamic conditions. Adaptation, in this context, becomes a transformative process—a negotiation where individuals and communities shape their environments to align with their desires and aspirations while simultaneously adjusting their behaviors, social norms, and even belief systems to suit the evolving context (P13). Traditional research methods may need to evolve due to the increasing complexity and systemic socio-economic design challenges. This transformation entails a shift from research on practice, research by practice to practice as research (P10). This method could empower design researchers and academics to delve deeper into the value of co-creation, dialogic cultural engagement, and the potential of “in-between” spaces, fostering innovative and inclusive urban strategies.