Transnational Living Lab for Active Ageing is an ambitious research project across Sweden and Japan, with the aim of improving the experience of ageing through social design and innovation. A core challenge is loneliness, which is addressed through interventions in the remit of work/occupation, housing, mobility. The Languaging Loneliness workshop has been developed to fast forward exploration of individual and collective experience of loneliness to inform development of policies, products and services. Tests to date in Sweden and Japan indicate that the workshop itself can reduce experience of loneliness.

The overall aim of this research is to explore evaluative frameworks and approaches fitting for the living lab community that genuinely capture innovative and unconventional methods directed at stimulating innovation and improving well being – emotional and physical, as exemplified by the Languaging Loneliness workshop.

Expected Outcomes:

– A comparison and map of different evaluative frameworks in the specific context of an intervention to reduce experience of loneliness.

– Brainstorming of new approaches to evaluation in the specific context of social design and wellbeing/quality of life.

– We anticipate that this workshop will take us further in capturing and communicating elusive emotional benefits of living lab approaches.

Opportunity to participate in a rich discussion and community around the dilemmas, opportunities, future pathways to evaluation in the living lab context. Participants will get hands-on experience from a workshop that synergises science and art, opportunity to share experiences, engage in critical and creative discussions, and design new pathways for evaluation of co-creation, ready for trial in the home context.