Paper short abstract:

Living Labs (LL) form an ecosystem of four co-creating stakeholders: Academia, Industry, Politics and the Public. What can we learn from them regarding public participation? The presentation will delve into the findings of a scoping review, examining LLs through the lens of science communication.

Paper long abstract:

Living Labs (LL) are becoming increasingly popular, not only in academia but also in R&D environments or commercial contexts [Wehrmann et al., 2023; Wershler et al., 2022]. Currently, it seems that they are emerging wherever some kind of public involvement is intended, making the term "LL" seem as much a concept as a strategic framing. But what are LLs?

They are utilized to study, test, co-design, and enhance new technologies within an ecosystem of four co-creating stakeholders: academia, industry, politics, and the public [Hossain et al. 2019; Esashika et al., 2023]. In this sense, they also fulfill important roles as sites of modern science communication. Different stakeholders collaborate as equal partners, and established boundaries between external "the public" and internal "academia" fall apart. Therefore, LLs offer interesting perspectives as examples of public participation in science and technology (PPST). Surprisingly LLs have so far received little to almost no attention from the perspective of science communication.

The presentation will delve into the findings of a scoping review, investigating a corpus of more than 1000 peer reviewed articles and reviews on LLs from different disciplines. It will examine how LLs and their stakeholder ecosystem are organized through the lens of science communication and further explore the practices within LLs to engage these stakeholders. The aim is for LLs to be recognized as previously overlooked sites of science communication, where PPST is already utilized by concept. Ultimately, the implementation of PPST in LLs is to be critically reviewed and put up for discussion.