Applied Design Research in Living Labs and Other Experimental Learning and Innovation Environments

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 the co-creation processes that take place in these labs, the design discipline plays an important role in these experimental environments.

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 Living Labs and focuses on design dilemmas that emerge while working in these Experimental Learning and Innovation Environments. The book explores the role of various stakeholders, including the roles that may play out during the development of Experimental Learning and Innovation Environments, 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 Urban Innovation Labs, Energy Living Labs, Mobility Living Labs, Health Living Labs, Education Living Labs, or Social Living Labs will find this book of interest.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Dr. ir. Peter Joore focuses specifically on design processes in which different types of actors, across sectoral boundaries, work together to solve complex societal issues in a living lab environment. He was trained as an industrial designer at TU Delft, where he also obtained his Ph.D. After graduation, he worked as a product designer at several companies. He started working at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), after which he switched to higher education, working as a professor of Open Innovation at the NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences in Leeuwarden.

Dr. Anja Overdiek is a professor of Cybersocial Design at the Creating 010 knowledge center of the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. She obtained her Ph.D in political sciences at the Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis in the sociology of knowledge field. Her research areas are multi-stakeholder collaboration, co-design, and experimental spaces, mainly aimed at societal transitions. She is particularly interested in the opportunities for digitization and interaction design for these transitions.

Dr. Wina Smeenk is a professor of Societal Impact Design at the Inholland University of Applied Sciences. She studied Industrial Design at the Delft University of Technology and obtained her Ph.D. with the thesis 'Navigating Empathy, empathic formation in co-design processes’. She worked as an innovation strategist and designer for international companies such as Giant Bicycles, Sony, and PlayStation. After working as a program manager for the Industrial Design course at the Eindhoven University of Technology, she developed innovative design-oriented educational programs for the Inholland, HAN, and HvA universities of Applied Sciences, and at THNK, the Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership.

Dr. ir. Koen van Turnhout is a professor of Human Experience and Media Design at the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. The research group focuses on User Experience (UX) professionals. Koen did his doctorate research at the Eindhoven University of Technology with interdisciplinary design research into speech interaction in a social context. His current research is aimed at the methodology of design (research) and the designing of data-driven smart products and services. Koen is the chairman of the Design Science Research Group, a community of practice for design-focused research, and of CHI Nederland, the professional association for human-computer interaction professionals.