Living the Lab: Rethinking Collaborative Practices in Living Lab Contexts Amid Polycrisis

Abstract

Positioned as a response to the proposition of conducting research in times of polycrisis, this article explores attentive collaboration as a research praxis for addressing cumulative societal challenges in living lab contexts. While living labs are inherently collaborative spaces, they have been criticized for prioritizing productivity and scalability, making the relational dimensions of collaboration difficult to realize. At the same time, the capacity of living labs to meaningfully involve people who are not typically in positions of power, as well as those experiencing crisis situations, has often been overlooked. In response to these challenges, this article presents a living lab workshop, designed as a space to experiment with collaborative research approaches in response to crisis scenarios. Rather than framing the workshop as merely a participatory research event focused on studying crisis, we approached it as a generative site of care-full being-with. During the workshop, temporal, ethical, epistemic, and affective tensions emerged, informing our conceptualization of attentive collaboration in living lab contexts. We argue that living labs must cultivate attentiveness not only to the complexity of issues, but also to the relationships necessary for responding carefully. © 2026 by the author(s), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY). 1