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. Their goal is 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 in a collaborative way.

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.

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. Such shared vision can become the basis for building a strategy leading to concrete and doable first steps.

Participatory Decision Making(Jeroen and Ellen, Nominal Group Technique)

Nominal group technique (NGT) is defined as a structured method for group brainstorming that encourages contributions from everyone and facilitates quick agreement on the relative importance of issues, problems, or solutions. Team members begin by writing down their ideas, then selecting which idea they feel is best. Once team members are ready, everyone presents their favorite idea, and the suggestions are then discussed and prioritized by the entire group using a point system.

NGT combines the importance ratings of individual group members into the final weighted priorities of the group.

The NGT supports collaborative thinking for group members who are less vocal then others or there is a need that all participants actively participate. It can also highlight differences of opinion, that otherwise might be not become apparent.

The method can be applied on site with paper and pen collecting the contributions on a flip chart and stickers for voting. On-line, one can make use of a digital tool such as mural.co or padlet. It is important to structure the time wel and to appoint a facilitator for timing, clarifying, categorising and prioritising the contributions. The group should not be too big, because otherwise the participants may lose their interest and focus. An on site session can last a bit longer than an online. The maximum time also depends on the commitment and interest of the participants for the issues addressed.

Designing together

Once the community has developed its goals, strategy, 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.