A living lab is a real-world environment where different actors from society and science can learn and co-create knowledge. Love Silow, a lecturer at the Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, has worked with living labs as a pedagogical approach in the course Foodscape2 at the masterprogramme Food and Landscape. Through this approach the students got to practice transdisciplinary and place-based skills in study visits to different foodscapes such as a restaurant, an urban farm and different landscapes.
’By studying different sites and practitioners in the food landscape we could access other knowledge sources that could feed into the knowledge traditions at the university, which made us see how we could create synergies and with whom’, says Love Silow.
Love Silow was first inspired to work with the living lab approach after being involved in the evaluation of an educational material concerning Living labs from the association AESOP (Association of European Schools of Planning). This inspired him to combine the living lab approach with food studies and landscape architecture in his own teaching.
‘The biggest opportunity to work with a living lab approach was the flexibility that this form of collaboration and knowledge co-creation offered and the possibilities to explore different perspectives. It offered a way to work in a case-based manner across disciplines’, says Love Silow.
One of the case seminars took place at Botildenborg urban farm where students engaged in creating a forest garden and discussed how the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences could contribute to the urban farming project and what could be the potential role of other actors, for instance Malmö municipality.
Love Silow thinks that the living lab approach could serve as a useful lens to make teaching more case-based. In the course other approachees such as digital living labs were also tested, where the students read up on material about the sites and research on living labs.
‘From my experience it was always better to visit the site in real life. Something else happened when we visited the site and it opened new perspectives.
Love Silow gives some advice to others that are curious in trying to integrate a Living Lab way of thinking in their courses.
‘Define why you want to try a Living Lab approach. If you are interested in trying transdisciplinarity, find out what would be the deal for and explore. Don’t be to rigid concerning the ouctomes. And ask for help from people who work with living labs.
The relevance is high in many different contexts within SLU and in relation to a more complex and global world, argues Love Silow.
‘If you consider visionary documents from SLU promoting transdisciplinary work and complex global questions, the living labs approach could be a useful lens to investigate many different perspectives, which also tests what these concepts mean when you put them in a real-world context. Other issues will emerge compared to working only with theoretical cases. Something happens when you need to concretise and that is a skill, because it is difficult.
According to Love Silow the students were also very positive to the approach and appreciated the perspectives that were closely knit to real-world cases.
‘This approach is definitely something that I want to repeat in future courses and continue to develop much further. But trying it out this time has been the greatest reward.’
