Living labs: creative, co-produced, caring
- Louwrens Botha
- Sep 13, 2024
- 6 min read
On September 13, the CoNECT project met for a one-day symposium and workshop on living lab methodologies at the Hägerstensåsens medborgarghus in Stockholm. Under the expert guidance of Meike Schalk, the day included presentations by other JPI-ENUTC projects, local initiatives, a tour of the ‘people’s house’ (medborgarghus), and a workshop on living lab methodologies. The CoNECT project members also shared their experiences with living lab activities in different countries. In this entry we reflect on the program and main insights, not necessarily in chronological order.
Let us start with the community center itself, where our event took place. Located in a south-western suburb of Stockholm, it has been operational in the current form since 1957 and it is part of a network of 500 such ‘people’s houses’ throughout Sweden. A vital piece of social infrastructure, the house is a spacious building with a variety of activity spaces from the library with its cozy fireplace; to a café that stays open throughout the day; a large event space used for folk dance performance, film screenings, and the popular ‘baby rave’(!); an exhibition space; a dance rehearsal space (also used by the senior’s table tennis club); small study rooms; and even a couple of FM radio broadcasting studios. Our tour guide, one of the creative directors of the building, talks animatedly about the people’s right to art, about a place where people can participate without consuming, and about the pedagogical role of the people’s house. He and his colleagues have many plans for the future, including the new print shop they are setting up in the basement of the building. But the operation of the house is not without challenges, from neglectful government policies to lack of funding. For us as guests, it was impossible not to feel the positive energy of the place and be impressed by the commitment to an ideal of community cohesion.
The program of the symposium included three presentations by guest speakers. Hanna Erikson Aalto kicked-off the presentation series with a talk about the MASSA project. Taking as its starting point the challenge of dealing with the enormous quantities of rubble from the extension of the Stockholm metro, the project included among many other activities, a set of creative living lab activities guides by local artists. Artistic and design-based methods were used as a strategy to break down barriers between different stakeholders, foreground unheard voices and perspectives to inform other ways of imagining the future, and seeing possibilities rather than problems. One example was a literal ‘deep dive’ that all the professionals involved in the project had to do in the Stockholm archipelago, donning wetsuits that made them all look the same, and engaging in a treasure hunt for underwater objects. Another intervention was a park bench mounted on an inflatable raft, on which professionals sailed out to the middle of the water where one proposal was to build an artificial island park – the participants could therefore experience first-hand how the city would look from this new park. Hanna reflected on the fact that including these creative activities help to break down the continuous drive to seek solutions – what she calls 'projectification' – and instead opened up the discussions and span of possibilities.
Eva Wolf and Cecilie Sachs Olsen introduced the CONTRA project, a JPI-ENUTC project focused on facilitating productive conflict in local urban development as a way to advance sustainability transformations. The main part of Eva and Cecilie’s presentation focused on their living lab activities in the project – the ‘Drama Labs’. These creative participation methods utilize different kinds of performative exercises inspired by theatre play in order to make underlying conflicts visible and allow them to play out in a facilitated setting. They presented four cases with a variety of situation adapted exercises. One case revolved around a conflict over a disused hospital building and explored two polarizing positions: demolish and redevelop, or keep and repurpose. Participants in the lab went through a series of steps from sitting around a centrally placed map of the site and placing their porcelain coffee cups to meaningful places on the map, to taking an audio tour of the site where different physical objects ‘voiced’ opinions about demolishing or preserving, to an echo chamber exercise where one group of participants (the demolishers) was smashing the cups on the map with a hammer, while the other group (the renovators) was repairing cups using kintsugi techniques, to a shouting match, and finally a reconciliation and reflection moment. Eva and Cecilie pointed out how the constructed sets of the play enabled people to question reality and the set frames in which problems are cast, stepping out of ingrained assumptions and positions. Through tactile engagement and embodied action, participants experienced first hand what it means to be in the opposing groups. Voices that are usually not heard were given a part in the play and made visible – for example in the form of the ‘child of the future’ as a silent observer in the discussions over future developments. A question that remained with us is whether these playful living lab activities really have an impact on policy and managerial processes in local governments, or if they can sway developers one way or another. From the answers of the two presenters it seemed clear that on a personal, relational level, participation in the labs did make a difference and helped to recast relationships between participants (municipal employees, developers, citizens) in a much more empathic way.
Finally, the third presentation by Martin Emanuel introduced the EmbedterLabs project, another JPI-ENUTC project focused on understanding the impact of street experiments, such as temporary cycling lanes or pop-up parks, on local mobility policies. Martin’s presentation focused on learning processes and took us through a historical trip into Stockholm street experiments. We could see a clear progression and a sort of institutionalization of street experiments, but also a shifting focus from changing mobility patterns to making public space more attractive through temporary installations. Through their interviews in the project, Martin and the team of EmbedterLabs uncovered a set of learning processes happening in these ‘experimental’ labs. These learning processes went beyond the site-specific learning called ‘performance learning’, toward more procedural, collaborative, communicative and organization learning that they called ‘process learning’. Martin’s presentation offered a great counterpoint to the first two presentations that focused on specific examples, by reflecting on the usefulness of labs and urban experimentation beyond the moment of their implementation.
Following a lovely lunch provided by the community center café, the afternoon of the event was dedicated to a workshop in which we tackled a set of questions about living lab methodologies in small group discussions. Without attempting a full recap of the discussion, a few key insights were about the ability of labs to create impact at the personal and community level through engaged co-production and co-creation. Labs can build trust in communities when done right, but at times too many expectations are assigned to these experimental set-ups. While living labs have become quite ubiquitous in research projects, especially those funded by the EU, there are clear risks that labs have to deal with, such as their temporariness and their often-unsustainable funding structures. There are situations in which labs fail to meet their aspirations especially if the expectations of participants are unclear or incongruent. Also, there remain unanswered (and maybe unanswerable) questions about the ability of labs to get to the root of problems and offer ways forward, given their local scale and temporary nature. Finally, it is important to stress that the kinds of living labs discussed in this event are a particular type of labs focused on deep citizen engagement, based on feminist theoretical perspectives that emphasize grace, care and empathy, and aimed at creating capacity especially in communities where social cohesion is low. In these contexts, living labs can contribute to building trust between (groups of) residents themselves, and between residents and local authorities or institutions. The careful management of expectations, continuity and follow-up is crucial in order for this trust to be sustained in the longer term and for participants’ time, energy and trust to be respected and rewarded.
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