Living Labs

One of the reasons that labs are everywhere in contemporary culture is because of the success of techniques like the living lab. As Pieter Ballon and Dmitri Schuurman, argue the term “living lab” more accurately describes a relationship or a method than a particular kind of space. In this spirit, we discuss living labs as a discursive practice and a cultural technique that relates to how urban space is designated as a lab, and how this mobilizes discourses about innovation, consumption, and allocation of potential roles to citizens as stakeholders. As such, the living lab is an ongoing test situation that also speaks to how smart cities are being introduced.

Ballon and Schuurman place living labs in three traditions: Scandinavian cooperative design and participatory design models developed by US engineers building on the Scandinavian model; state-sponsored social experiments with it in Europe; and the 1990s “digital city” initiatives that were a precursor to today’s omnipresent “Smart City” discourse (n.p.). If living lab discourse has a common thread, it’s that it places a heavy emphasis on community members and users as co-creators with the experimenter (Ballon and Schuurman, n.p.) although, as we will see, the term has also become closely related to a consumer-centred discourse and forecasting trends.47 In the 1990s, Bajiger et. al. were using the term to describe a model for a course in which students at the Drexel University College of Business and Administration were studying South Street in Philadelphia. They argue that their conceptual model could also be used by other institutions, and that other forms of public spaces, like “municipal facilities or sports stadiums,” can also serve as labs (708). Since the 1990s, the living labs model has been adopted in a variety of contexts around the globe and has developed a robust literature.48 But from the start, a “living lab” has been a spatial practice or technique—both a methodology and a physical context—and it can be deployed in many contexts in order to produce labs.

The key point of the living labs model is to include community engagement in the pedagogical process, so that classroom members (including the instructor and graduate assistants) interact as a team with neighbourhood groups and individuals. These groups and individuals are not simply sources of research problems. The long history of unexpected and unintended uses for technologies demonstrates that the users of such technologies often come up with unexpected uses for the outputs of scholarly research. The class confronts pressing issues relevant to the community and presents their findings back to decision makers in the community on a not-for-profit basis (Bajiger et. al. 703, 709). As a result, students develop not only a set of practical research skills and interpersonal communication skills, but a stake in policy debate and formation in their own community.

The insights of Galison and Jones also apply here. Living labs take the form of the dominant mode of cultural production, and have changed along with it. Leminen et. al. have moved to describing the living lab first as a network, and then a platform. The idea of the network is important because constant contact between researchers produces cross-fertilization and prevents the ossification of research (Leminen et. al. 2); the goal is to produce an “innovation system” (Ballon and Schuurman, n.p.). The socially networked dimension of the living lab suggests that they also have an institutional and a policy dimension. This is strongest in Europe, though there is also an increasing interest at the municipal level of government in North America (think of the countless “smart cities” initiatives in the news at the moment). The EU living labs network has been supported by key European Union policy measures around the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), which was put in place in 2006 and bolstered in 2010. The network now includes labs in Brazil, Colombia, Canada, Mexico, Australia, China and Egypt. Over 300 labs were evaluated by EnoLL since 2006, with 35–40% no longer operating (Ballon and Schuurman, n. pag.). . . . a reminder that labs are often project-based, and that they have a finite lifespan.

Living labs are no more homogenous than labs themselves. There are significant differences between various models of laboratory community engagement, particularly in terms of those that see innovation as a process in which university research is monetized. The latter tend to conceive of community research co-creators as consumers more than citizens. Eric Von Hippel’s influential concept of the “lead user” is a case in point. For Von Hippel, “Lead users are users whose present strong needs will become general in a market-place months or years in the future. Since lead users are familiar with conditions which lie in the future for most others, they can serve as a need-forecasting laboratory for marketing research. Moreover, since lead users often attempt to fill the need they experience, they can provide new product concept and design data as well” (Von Hippel 791). Consumers and users are not the same as citizens and audiences, and marketing research is not the same as community issues. The discourse of lead users is all about access to emerging markets. Lead users are important because they point to developing trends, not because they identify a pressing civic need.

In contemporary living lab discourse, community stakeholders increasingly become businesses rather than individuals or citizen groups; the community audience for academic research becomes consumers; and innovation prioritizes the monetization of research as opposed to contributing to the public good. In “Living Labs as a Multi-Contextual R&D Methodology,” Mats Eriksson, Veli-Pekka Niitamo, Seija Kulkki, Karl A. Hribernik quote Per Eriksson, Director at the Swedish Agency for Innovation systems stated, as stating “research is making knowledge out of money—innovation is making money out of knowledge” (2).

There are also those who would reclaim the living lab model for artistic use. In Gabriella Arrigioni’s relatively recent work on living labs as a model for artistic exhibition, the idea of the lead user points to “certain continuities between media labs and LLs [living labs]: the idea of artist as innovator or lead user (not just applying existing technologies to creative purposes, but developing media and applications in close collaboration with scientists and technologists) is an essential premise with which to speculate on the role of the audience itself as innovator” (217). Arrigioni believes that living labs can learn plenty from media labs, including a better sense of which publics they are addressing, new models of governance, techniques for building infrastructural relationships with existing institutions like universities, arts organizations and lab networks, and how to structure outreach activities such as workshops and training programs (219, 223). Arrigioni is also skeptical of the political promises that “openness” once held, but she maintains that there is a “strong political potential” (216) for the living lab movement, because it has demonstrated the capacity to address real social needs instead of mere consumer desires. This also resonates with other voices in the field that have argued that creativity needs to be harnessed as a force with relevance beyond the usual emphasis on the artist: “a more democratic model of creative practice holds enormous potential for social benefit and is consistent with the community focus of citizen media labs.”49 This focus is part of some good European examples such as the Media Lab Prado, and represents a link between some of the uses of the terms living lab and the media lab in current policy contexts.