Welcome to the LivingLab, U of Southampton.
The Vision of the LivingLab is to create the best work and study environment in the world for our entire community.
We are an interdisciplinary campus. Our teaching is research-lead and our researchers lead and collaborate on internationally leading work to help make the world a better place. Our Mission with the LivingLab is to bring together this research accumen to our own back yard: to build up interdisciplinary research on wellbeing that starts at home, here at the University, is tested here, and from here, can benefit the world.
EVERYONE IS A SCIENTIST
Within the LivingLab, everyone in our community is a scientist: that is, we can each of us contribute to creating new knowledge.
Our focus in the lab to build interdisciplinary studies to explore how we can better support our health, wellbeing and aspirations. We will be developing calls for our community to propose work to be associated with the Lab.
A COMMUNITY OF CITIZEN SCIENTISTS
Everyone associated with the Lab, with a project or interest to share expertise will be part of our development community.
Our goal is to have close ties with all parts of the university community, such as Estates, Catering, Admin and Reseasrch, to share in ideas/new questions where the campus can be our lab to explore the art and science of the possible.
A NEAR HORIZON: Building Interdisciplinary Networks for Students
We are keen to bring project students from across campus together who may be interested in a LivingLab focused projects: we will host short talks and brown bag lunches for students to meet, learn about each others work and share ideas.
We will also be developing signage for the campus to make it clear WHERE a LivingLab project is underway and WHAT it’s exploring.
AN EXAMPLE PROJECT: SLEEP PILOT 1
The first project for the living lab is our Sleep Better Explorer. Our goal is to help people intersted in sleeping better become Experimental Scientists of their own Sleep. They can run any 3 of 9 sleep experiments over 15 days, with tools helping them discover with these practices: do you feel better?
While participants learn about their sleep, the anonymised data from these studies will help create a resource we call FUTURE GHOSTS – for people curious about sleep to see what’s worked for People Like You – to see a possible future if you explore that method.
The data also contributes to Open Science for other researchers to use.
Towards our Vision to help build the best work environment, helping people sleep better is of course going to help people feel better, but projects like this also help us look at infrastructure – to explore systemic possibilities. What if for instance a particular cohort are ALL having difficulty sleeping at particular times?
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
The LivingLab is a new enterprise at U of Southampton. If you’re interested in this kind of collaborative, interdisciplinary work; connecting your work with the Lab, or whatever ideas you have, we’ll be putting together an invitation mid summer 2020.
IF you’d like to learn more as it evovles please join the Living Lab Teams Team.
This project is lead by prof m.c. schraefel of the WellthLab