Samenvatting

Living Labs are ‘open innovation ecosystems’, offering unique opportunities for conducting scientific experiments ‘in the wild’. Yet, Living Labs also support the generation of other, informal, types of knowledge: often tacit and difficult to capture and share, acquired outside of rigorous academic research frames, and comprising insights, ideas and know-how gained through experience, serendipity, and sometimes ad-hoc and playful explorations. This chapter focuses on the significant, yet often overlooked, role that prototypes play in triggering, articulating and sharing such informal knowledge. Grounded in the discourse on the role of prototypes in Research through Design (RtD), the chapter brings forth that prototypes are not just valuable as artefacts to be studied through formalised research but are also crucial in supporting the generation of rich, contextual insights, ideas and know-how, sharing them across experiments, disciplines and stakeholders, while often facing the challenge of legitimisation and generalisation of such knowledge.