On September 16th and 17th, European Ulalabs partners and regional stakeholders converged in the vibrant city of Linköping for a breakout session titled, “Exploring the Role of Living Labs for Urban Sustainability Innovation,” as part of the Future Now Forum. This gathering also included a transnational coordination meeting, marking a significant milestone in our collaborative journey.
Meeting in Linköping: A Beacon of Innovation
Linköping, the host city for our meeting, is a beacon of innovation and sustainability. Recently awarded the European Capital of Innovation Award 2023 in the category of European Rising Innovative City, Linköping is a place where world-leading research and groundbreaking innovations are shaping a better future. The city’s university, municipality, civil society, and business community work hand-in-hand to turn innovative ideas into reality. With a population of 166,700, Linköping is Sweden’s fifth-largest city and is on a mission to become a carbon-neutral municipality.
Future Visioning Workshop: Imagining the Distributed Living Lab
As part of our Ulalabs project transnational meeting on Monday, September 16, we held a Future Visioning Workshop led by the DesignLab at the University of Twente. This workshop applied responsible futuring methodologies and creative exercises to collaboratively envision a shared future for the Distributed Living Lab (Lab of Labs). The DesignLab’s approach to responsible futuring is rooted in design thinking and addresses societal challenges from a societal perspective rather than a technological one. This methodology emphasizes trans-disciplinary practices, responsible design, and social involvement to drive societal impact. It encourages stakeholders to break disciplinary boundaries and become agents of societal change, using moral imagination to generate potential solutions.
Imagining the Future – Dynamic, Collaborative Environment
Our discussions focused on the principles and premises that should underpin the future Distributed Living Lab across various regions. A central theme in our vision for the Distributed Living Lab is inclusivity and equality. We imagined a future where anyone can participate without boundaries, ensuring that all voices can be heard and valued. This vision promotes a bottom-up approach, empowering society to take the lead in shaping the living lab environment.
We explored the potential for living labs to become central hubs of innovation, led by citizens and balancing – or even disrupting – power dynamics. This vision includes creating new frameworks for living lab practices that are more accessible and less dominated by established institutions, as well as providing sustainable funding, linking people with resources, with the aim to overcome resource constraints and ensure the continuity of projects over time. By fostering a shared sense of ownership and responsibility, we can ensure that living labs remain inclusive and equitable.
While virtual interactions are valuable and create new opportunities, throughout the discussions, we emphasized the importance of physical connections and face-to-face interactions. Building strong, tangible connections between different living labs and their participants can enhance collaboration and innovation.
When playing with the design and model of the imagined Distributed Living Lab, using the symbol of the “babel fish,” we emphasized that communication across diverse actors is crucial, pointing to the need to facilitate not just language translation but also the translation of values and decision-making reasons. Our visions include integrating various types of nature and non-human beings as stakeholders, recognizing the interconnectedness of all life forms.
Finally, given the accelerating pace of societal and environmental changes, we recognized the potential role and capacity of the living labs to respond and propose co-created solutions to those.
In the afternoon, we also had a chance to visit Ebbepark district that provides a testbed for a variety of research projects, including the Climate Neutral Linköping 2030 project (see more below).
Ulalabs Break-Out Session: Living Labs and Testbeds as Innovation Spaces for Sustainability Transformations
On Tuesday, September 17, as part of the Future Now Forum, we organized a break-out session titled “Exploring the Role of Living Labs for Urban Sustainability Innovation.” We had the opportunity to learn about the role and experiences with living labs and experimentation spaces from HUB B30 (Spain), Enschede (The Netherlands), Nordic Edge (Norway), and Ebbepark (Linköping, Sweden).
We heard from Angela Rijnhart on the transformation and the innovative ecosystem of the city of Enschede and the region of Twente, showcasing its different initiatives, such as Circular Textile Lab and ChallengeLab Twente. We have learned about the different spaces where the municipality and Design Lab/University of Twente are connecting scientific knowledge about citizen science and practical experiences on participation processes and creating learning communities to work together on a social and sustainable city.
Torrill Steinback from Nordic Edge, running Norway’s innovation clusters for smart city technology and AgriTech, and Innovation Centre ‘Innoasis,’ stressed the importance of cross-sectoral cooperation and shared various agile piloting (Kvikktest) projects in which sites or neighbourhoods are used as testbeds for innovation and green transition solutions, partnering with the University of Stavanger.
Sergio Martínez shared the HUB30 experience in Catalonia, particularly the Vallès Labs Network, which provides spaces for participation and co-creation in which new models of open, transformative, and user-based innovation are promoted, supporting local agents in delivering transformative actions while implementing the methodology of Shared Agendas. These, supported by the RIS3CAT Strategy, aim to develop viable alternatives to unsustainable dominant practices and accelerate transitions towards a socioeconomic model aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Among the others, Sergio showcased the example of the development of the Shared Agenda to promote economic and sustainable transformation towards the goal of zero waste in the territory of the Mollet-Cerdanyola axis.
With the presentation of Sara Malmgren, we had the opportunity to learn more about the experiences of Ebbepark, a recently constructed new central city district in Linköping, built and living environment that can be tested on a 1:1 scale, a physical test environment in a living district, a real-world laboratory, where new ideas and solutions from both business and academia are tested, verified, and potentially brought to market to promote social and environmental sustainability.
Following the presentations, we had group discussions to identify key strategies and components, as well as the enablers and barriers for the work of Living Labs and Testbeds as innovation spaces for sustainability transformations. Among some of the enablers, participants stressed the potential opportunities that come from combining intersectionality and interdisciplinarity in the living labs, as well as the importance of facilitation roles and communication in the co-creation processes, aiming to reach the natural and inclusive engagement of all parts. Cultural differences and cooperation were also named as very strong enablers, recognising also the importance and opportunities that a potential future European Distributed Living lab could provide.
Participants acknowledged the interdependency and interconnectedness of different elements, noting that these can be both enablers and barriers, pointing out the example of funding (both material and immaterial) that could allow for a long-term perspective.
The inputs and insights gathered during the session will be analyzed in detail and will feed into the final publication of the work package focusing on the research on the status quo and perception of living labs and different experimental spaces, identifying the major challenges and success factors for the development of distributed learning communities and the strategies and approaches to foster Higher Education Institutes - community engagement that exist in each region and on a distributed level. The report will be published in the upcoming weeks.
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