Our Vision
Living Labs affect positive change through experimentation.
Living Labs establish partnerships or programmes which connect academic activities of the institution (such as learning & teaching, and academic research) with non-academic partners. Our University Living Lab is unique because it harnesses the power and capacity of students to affect change through applied research with external organisations as part of their degree learning.
We co-produce student projects with external organisations that help them to meet their sustainable development goals. At the same time our projects enable students to make a difference through their studies whilst developing their skills and enhancing their learning experience. We are using this platform as a way to showcase the Projects available, and to promote the Reports produced by our students. We are working under the pedagogic framework of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals aiming to work in partnership, leave nobody behind and affect change for a better world, for all, by 2030.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. We have adopted a framework of the 17 SDGs.
Each Project and Report is tagged with its respective SDGs. (This is, of course, open to interpretation and arguably every SDG could be applicable to sustainable development related research).
We use the pedagogy of the SDGs: we work in partnership, we work in an inclusive and accessible way, we believe that interdisciplinary partnership at multi-scale affects change. We also aim to leave nobody behind. For a better and more sustainable future for all, we need to work together to achieve the Goals by 2030.
Why a partnership between students and organisations?
Universities concentrate huge amounts of untapped human resources. Some quick calculations produce rather startling figures. Our institution, the University of Manchester, alone, has 40 000 students, a quarter of whom study subjects related directly to sustainability. According to calculations by Evans et al., (2015) these 10 000 students spend an average of 1500 hours per year studying, of which perhaps half could be directed towards applied research on real world problems with non-academic stakeholders. This would yield 7.5 million hours of research time on sustainability issues- just through students’ core learning. In turn that experience is then accessible to all students.
A similar calculation produces a total of 0.5 million students studying on sustainability related courses in the UK (HESA, 2014), who could offer 375 million hours.
Globally, Goddard (2011) suggests that there will be 262m students in higher education by 2025. Applying the same multipliers results in an annual global research resource for sustainability of 49 billion hours, or 5.6m years.
Even granting considerable margins of error, these figures suggest that the task of engaging university students in real world sustainability challenges is worthwhile- and could have incredible impact.
Explore the site to find out how you can make a difference.
The University Living Lab was established as the first of its kind in 2013. Since then our students have worked with a huge range of partner organisations, including international consultants, governments, health bodies, charities and local businesses. Impacts range from work on urban resilience that was presented to the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, to building business cases for local beekeeping in South Manchester.
“The student reports were really helpful to us as they pointed us to research and potential partners we wouldn't otherwise have known about, and they formed a key part of the plan going forward”
— Craig Thomas, the Old Abbey Taphouse,