Samenvatting

Municipalities collaborate with citizens to find locally adapted ways to deal with the energy transition. Industry clusters work together with regional governments and knowledge institutions to develop and test new sustainable materials. Universities co-create with students and industry to find a more practice-oriented and experimental manner of learning. Nowadays everyone is developing environments to innovate and collaborate with diverse actors to face challenges that have outgrown the potential of just one group of actors tackling them. Most of these experimental environments and even the projects running in them use the term ‘Living Lab’ to describe themselves. Where does this popular approach come from and how did it develop in practice? How do different sorts of real-life labs relate to each other? And in what directions could particularly designers and applied design research help to develop experimental environments further? These are some questions the following chapter will unpack to provide an overview of the dynamic landscape of Living Labs and other experimental environments. We will do this based on a review of the international literature on Living Labs and on our own experience as practice researchers in this field in the Netherlands.