Ginninderry Living Lab: Designing a Research Framework for better liveability and sustainability

This one-year project involves co-design of a research framework with Ginninderry, the site’s residents and relevant stakeholders to formulate robust, creative methodologies to gather and evaluate data on liveability, wellbeing and sustainability in a greenfield development. Utilising a social practice approach we will develop, trial and iterate a place-based, citizen-centred participatory living lab methodological framework, leveraging both the Ginninderry and ACT Government (ACT Planning Strategy, 2018: 19) commitment to living lab research. Living labs are citizen-centred environments for innovation – situated in real-world contexts – within which public-private-people partnerships identify urban challenges and then develop and trial new practices, products, services to address these (Stahlbrost & Holst, 2017; Hossain et al. 2018). The living lab framework will first map existing community knowledges and practices, using this new knowledge to mobilise a practice-oriented community primed to engage in ongoing experimentation to trial and test a range of creative, design-led techniques centred on improving experiences of liveability and wellbeing and enactment of sustainable practices. An evaluation framework to assess short-term and long-term outcomes of the living lab experiments will also be developed. Key tasks include: 1.A review of the extant literature, and of indices designed to measure liveability, wellbeing and sustainability in urbandevelopment 2.A review of existing Ginninderry datasets and data collection methods 3.Co-creation of a living lab framework across a selected range of liveability, wellbeing and sustainability indicators (e.g. use ofhome and land; use of public space; energy use; participation in cultural life; happiness) 4.Co-design of experimental and design-led techniques for data collection to inform innovation, leverage existing knowledges andpractices and, where necessary, support social change and inform planning strategies and relevant urban policies.