I enjoyed hosting the Learning from Living Labs and Built Environment Testing Facilities SASBE Seminar recently.

We had excellent presentations from Jan Hugo, Elena Malakhatka, Sui-Kit Lau and Andy van den Dobbelsteen. Labs presented included the HSB Living Lab, Tropical Technologies Lab, the TU Delft Campus, and the CSIR and NHBRC test sites.

Some interesting issues were raised and discussed. These included:

How do you ”replicate reality” in a living lab?

Are you replicating current situations or trying to create future scenarios to test how they work? For instance, the HSB Living Lab is trialling communal laundry systems and a product-as-service approach, as well as testing different insulation types.

How big is your living lab?

Can living labs be at an organisational, or campus-wide scale? How do you use findings to start changing organisational policies, operational decisions as well as future capital investment decisions? For instance, the TU Delft Campus is drawing from its research to trial more plant-based options at student canteens and restaurants across the campus.

What are you measuring in living labs?

Are you measuring the technical performance of the building? Or is your research on the behaviour of occupants? The Tropical Technologies Lab measures both technical aspects of building fabric and systems and occupancy behaviour in buildings to get an overall view of performance and alignment.

What is the difference between a living lab and a built environment testing facility?

Are you interested in understanding how people use buildings or in how a particular building element performs under different conditions? For instance, the CSIR and NHBRC have built environment testing facilities. These are not occupied and are used to test the physical aspects of buildings only. These are different from the living labs that are occupied and are used to understand how buildings and systems are used by people.

A recording of the SASBE Seminar can be found here.