Experimental learning and innovation environments, such as living labs, field labs, and urban innovation labs, are increasingly used to connect multi-stakeholders in envisioning, creating, experimenting, learning, and trying out novel responses to diverse societal challenges. With designers facilitating lab processes and/or testing artifacts together with users, the design discipline plays an important role in these labs.

Applied Design Research in Living Labs and Other Experimental Learning and Innovation Environments combines a focus on experimental learning and innovation environments (or living labs) with a focus on applied design research. It offers an interdisciplinary perspective by bringing together diverse stakeholders from different disciplines, the book will adopt an interdisciplinary perspective, integrating insights from design, innovation, sociology, technology, and other relevant fields. It showcases real-world examples and case studies of successful applied design research in experimental learning and innovation environments and focuses on design dilemmas that emerge while working in experimental learning and innovation environments. The book explores the role of various stakeholders, including the roles that may play out during the development of these labs, and goes on to discuss the balance between fixed or fluid roles of these stakeholders and the polarity between working within one specific discipline versus working with various expertise or disciplines.

Designers, government representatives, and researchers who apply a living lab approach to solve multi-stakeholder challenges in various fields by applying energy, mobility, health, education, or social living labs will find this book of interest.

Content

1. Experimentation at the Heart of Societal Change.

2. Living Labs and Other Experimental Environments.

Part 1. Living Labs and Societal Transitions.

3. The Art of Connection.

4. Co-designing towards Transitions?

5. Exploring the potential of Festivals as Living Labs for Systemic Innovation.

Part 2. Social Dynamics in Living Labs.

6. Opening & Closing Hours.

7. Experimenting with Novel Knowledge: a Plea for Communities of Practice.

8. The Open Lab as Boundary Object.

Part 3. Materialisation of the Living Lab.

9. Bridging Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue about AI Systems in the Lab: How Virtual Can We Go?

10. Between Experiments – Leveraging Prototypes to Trigger, Articulate and Share Informal Knowledge.

11. Ceci n’est pas un Prototype.

12. Concerning Apples & Oysters.

13. In Conclusion: Unlocking the Potential of Living Labs: Insights and Strategies.

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