A stand-alone institution to foster community-academia knowledge co-creation

Living Lab Institute by practice is embedded in place, where learning and making happen in relationship with the community and the ecology of the place.

The institute is envisioned to become an open collaborative place-based knowledge observatory to experiment, reflect and evolve modes of learning and pedagogy situated in several micro-contexts that make a place.

We, the fellows and community co-facilitators of the Institute, extend invitation to learners, community collaborators, educators, scholars, grassroots workers, activists, creative practitioners, policymakers, educational institutions, think-tanks, research organisations, NGOs, government Institutions and curious individuals to envision a future, collectively co-created from diverse place-based knowledge with us.

Our Institute's Axioms

01 Support Over Solve
Problem-solving can provide short-term relief while we want to create support infrastructures embedded in a place and its public.

02 Experimentation at the Heart
We want to be messy, unfinished, fluid and open over longer term while we critically reflect on failures. In other words a safe to fail ecosystem is essential for us to collectively thrive.

03 Academia-Activism co-exist
We want to explore and create situations to invoke critical questions converging from diverse vantage points with a shared understanding of carefully considered Place-based actions.

04 Care-in-Practice
We begin by acknowledging care can be of many kinds and from a place we learn to care by creating shared moments in specific situations, conditions, and coexistence of care inherent within micro-contexts.

05 Orchestrating from Disciplines
Micro-contexts reveal their qualities partially to a discipline. Its complex interconnected existence demands place-based actions to be orchestrated from various disciplines. Helping to shape a discipline.

06 Slowness is critical
By nature, learning with complexity of a place is slow while the process of learning in a place is responsive.

07 Knowledge production from Living Practice
Everyday living and practice is a space for knowledge production. Our endeavor is to bring these multi-modal ways of knowledge production into processes of co-creation in our network.

08 Place-based actions
The idea of a place encompasses many things, where the process of knowledge production is a result of 'living'. We have found value in repeatedly engaging long-term in a place-based manner.

09 Learning from below
We believe communities have a tacit understanding of problems, challenges and constraints that are experiential. We see our platform as a space for co-learning and learning from below.

10 Culture as a catalyst
Communities and their micro-contexts are sites for cultural production. We want to use culture as a catalyst to build relationships within our network.