Festival Living Labs: Involving the Festival Community in Sustainable Experimentation

For a radical transformational change for sustainability, design requires an integrated approach, whereas designers have to contextualize their design from product and service level (micro) to integration in the socio-technical infrastructures (meso) towards the societal landscape (macro). Since design functions socially and its features relate to the social and psychological world of human, both technical and human centered aspects are important in design development. For this reason, many contemporary design paradigms advocate a user-centered and participatory approach. To accelerate design for transformational change, sustainability transition approaches emphasize the importance of purposive experimentation, often in the context of protected spaces. An approach that can facilitate this space for experimentation providing a real-life community with social, cultural and technical infrastructures to integrate design is that of festival living labs. Festivals are considered as meeting places of modern culture serving as temporary cities with a social and cultural role to strengthen communities, express social identities and worldviews. Most festivals are rebuilt every time they are hosted, and these iterations enable interventions to its infrastructures in relation to the festival community. Combining an integrated and
human-centered approach, we investigated how the festival community can be involved in experimentation for sustainable design at festival living labs.