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Short abstract:

This presentation aims to explore how institutions reconfigure their technoscientific work through living labs (LL). Focusing in the health field, we describe how institutions use LL to drive towards openness, new knowledge production methods, institutional evolution and interaction changes.

Long abstract:

Institutions serve as the foundational infrastructure of modern societies and their knowledge production system; however, they are increasingly facing greater risks of collapse meeting the changing needs of contemporary society and the rapid advancement of technology. These challenges have forced institutions to seek new ways of producing knowledge and engaging with their externality. In this context, living labs emerge as innovative solutions to reconfigure institutions from their traditional system, characterized by large and closed structures, towards spaces of greater openness and adaptability.

We situate ourselves in the heatlh field to illustrate this phenomenon. Through the mapping of a total of 86 health living labs in Europe, 15 interviews conducted with different living lab managers and participants, and alongside ethnographic research within a hospital-based living lab, this research illustrates the emergence of living labs as tools for the establishment of new approaches of scientific and technical work within the health domain. In contrast to the conventional attributes of institutional models, which often prioritize disciplinary technologies and restrict movement, we draw upon the concept of "extitution" to describe institutional changes towards aspects such as control, movement, and participation.

We situate living labs as a means of extitutionalisation, which encompasses instruments and methodologies capable of creating new ways of (co)producing knowledge, thus fostering institutional openness and reconfiguration. Consequently, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of how health institutions evolve through living labs in response to sociotechnological changes, ultimately shaping and changing their interactions with both internal hierarchy and external associations.