A design study into multi-level living labs for reuse and repair activities in France

Abstract

The European economy is surprisingly wasteful and continues to operate a take-make-dispose system. Addressing this challenge requires moving from a centralizing and top-down logic of waste management to territorial approaches integrating reuse and repair activities and involving local stakeholders. To do so, living labs are a relevant approach to support the transition towards territorial repair and reuse networks. The purpose of this paper is to question how living lab thinking can integrate the development of such repair and reuse networks.This paper first explores literature on transition design, living labs and repair and reuse activities. Secondly, it examines the design and deployment of a multi-level repair and reuse oriented living labs: (1) at the product level, it supports the participants in both learning and experimenting the basic stages in repair/upcycling practices; (2) at the repair workshop level, it helps imagine the implementation of a repair workshop and its business model, and (3) at the territorial level, it stimulates new synergies based on territorial metabolism of repair and reuse networks. A qualitative analysis on the experiment is then developed around five different objectives: (i) to strengthen the repair and reuse culture in order to (ii) collectively imagine (iii) territorialized repair and reuse networks with (iv) high social and environmental values and (v) considering how a decision taken at a system level can affect other levels, This research contributes to the transition design, developing intermediary tools to support the co-creation and/or evolution of system structures of production-consumption based on repair and reuse grassroots initiatives at the territorial level.