What actually is a living lab?
Depending on who you talk to, you can get a variety of definitions of what a living lab actually is. These range from the suggestion that a living lab is a government-friendly buzzword, to a thriving innovation ecosystem that sounds as though it is going to revolutionise the world.
To understand what a living lab is, and to help describe where NOVELL Redesign fits in the living lab landscape, we’ve added a page to our website that steps you through our team’s thinking. The interesting thing about the NOVELL project is that it isn’t following a particular model of living lab, but instead is using bits and pieces from a number of living lab approaches to create a framework that we think can best address the challenge we are tackling.
The history is kept deliberately brief on that page, but the term Living Laboratory can actually be traced back to Thomas Knight, an 18th century Welsh scientist. Knight coined the term “Living Laboratory” to describe a scientific laboratory setup that incorporated unknown variables of the real world, and in particular, the human body. The term didn’t really take off, and it wasn’t used very much again until an Australian professor, William (Bill) Mitchell, working at MIT started using it as a way of describing his HomeLab experiments. The idea was similar, in that rather than looking at the way people acted in laboratory experiments, Mitchell wanted to study how they acted in the comfort of their own home. Because sensors were expensive and complex in the 1990s, Mitchell constructed a series of home-like environments in his lab, and asked people to come and spend extended periods of time in them. This form of experimentation has since been expanded beyond the lab, so rather than taking people into the lab, the lab is now being inserted into peoples’ homes. Projects like Lochiel Park in Adelaide, South Australia, have been monitoring the energy consumption patterns and behaviours of occupants continuously since 2011.
Fast-forward to 2009, and under the Finish presidency of the European Commission, a project called CORDIS was established that should to establish a European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL). Unlike the HomeLab and monitoring experiments that had come before it, ENoLL proposed a framework based on a slightly different understanding of the living lab concept. Rather than being about researching on people and monitoring their behaviours, ENoLL sought to build on the Scandinavian tradition of co-design and participatory design to create an environment where researchers could partner with community members, government, and industry. Though this may seem a small shift, the change from researching on, to researching with is significant.
This approach can often challenge our preconceptions of the lab as a space that privileges the experimental methods of the physical sciences, but opens up new opportunities to develop insights through collaborative methodologies and practices.
Perhaps one of the reasons why the living lab concept is so hard to understand is that it is typically defined not by what it is, but instead by what it isn’t. Where researchers, or labs themselves have sought to define ‘rules’ for living labs, these are generally very open and allow for a rich variety of approaches to emerge within them. This can be frustrating for newcomers to the methodology who are looking for certainty and clarity, but has allowed a tremendous range of labs to emerge, from those that are reminiscent of double-blind control group methods, to those that focus on culture and community building.
As you will find on the NOVELL living lab page, NOVELL Redesign is describing itself as having both a technical and a social orientation. This means, there are elements of NOVELL that are focused on using complex statistical methods to uncover patterns and build evidence, and there are parts of the project that rely on dialogue and exchange between interdisciplinary groups of participants to create new knowledge.
If you’re interested in finding out more about our approach, or want to get in touch to learn more about living labs generally, get in touch via our contact page or sign up to our newsletter.