The Emergence of Living Lab Methods

Innovative sustainable solutions in living and working setups need to embrace users’ appropriation of technologies in their daily life practices. Successful innovation scenarios implicate adaptability in technologies for users to engage in a process in which technology and practices are adapted, and even new practices are adopted as result of the appropriation. Sustainability Living Lab (SLL) offers a socio-technical infrastructure to support user-centric innovation processes for the development and adoption of sustainable solutions. It offers a collaborative platform where professionals from different disciplines work together with future users and public and private stakeholders to generate solutions that are rooted in the dynamics of daily life practices. Future users play an active role in generating and applying contextualized practice-based knowledge in the innovation process. Central in the process is the integration of users’ experiences and sustainability impact of their practices around technology appropriation. A new generation of in-situ and mixed methods is emerging to facilitate this process. This chapter introduces an integrated approach based on in-situ and mixed methods to systemize the integration of objective and subjective aspects of daily life practices at different stages of the innovation process. Three levels of integration are described with each addressing different needs and abilities of the professionals, clients and future users involved in such projects. Each level suggests specific involvement of monitoring and self-reporting activities with outcomes that varies from describing behaviours, explaining the factors that influence behaviours as well as their impact, and experimenting on alternative behaviours.