WAVE Living Lab Methods

Our WAVE Living Labs aim at creating knowledge, ideas and actions for more sustainable water areas in Europe.

Living Labs are initiated by each partner university in close cooperation with their local communities.

This page presents an overview of methods and approaches used in our living labs in order to bring universities and their community environment into a collaborative design process.

The methods are clustered into three phases starting from reaching out to the community to the actual process of creating something new.

Feel free to test these approaches in your own living lab or any educational context aiming at building alternative futures for our local landscapes.

Understanding, empathizing and building trust The methods presented here not only help in creating bottom-up local knowledge about landscape challenges and potentials. By implementing them, all participants enter a process of mutual understanding. Building this level of trust is crucial for the success of a living lab process. Story Telling (Friedrich, Irina) Go Along Interviews (Friedrich, Irina) Photovoice and Cell Phone Diaries (De la Penas, Ellen) ‘Engagement by design’ (Katja) Power and Conflict Mapping (Katja, Irina) Landscape role play, community theatre (Jeroen)

Framing themes and setting goals

Once the landscape has been explored and explained with the above mentioned methods, many issues and topics will be on the table. We have limited time and resources, so priorities have to be set in an inclusive and participatory way. The difficult aspect here is to find the right balance between feasible short term action and over-simplification, given that landscape problems are often multidimensional and wicked. The following methods help in setting collective goals in order to build a shared vision. This shared vision should be the basis for building a strategy leading to concrete and doable first steps.

Future Workshops (Collective Visioning) (Ellen) Participatory Decision Making - nominal group technique (Jeroen and Ellen) Creating and evaluating scenarios (use course material, Simon video)

Designing together

Once the community has developed its goals, strategy and design themes and priorities, the actual co-design can start. However, there is often no clear linear distinction between these three phases. Design ideas might inspire new goals and lead to a change in the strategy. Or new people come on the scene as they are intrigued or inspired by the design ideas. They might bring in new knowledge and needs and the design will further evolve.

Transect walks (Ingrid) Mapping Resources through neighborhood Exploration, (Alessandra, Antonio) ‘Dirty design’, fast and rapid design, fast feedback loops (Sonja) Urban gaming >>> invent games for specific sites or for specific solution types (Didier, Dana) Co-creative design sessions >>> Sonja has a resource Prototyping and interventions Co-evaluation: https://www.betterevaluation.org/en/start_here