Towards a Learning System for University Campuses …
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key categories for data collection (referred to as general, scope, organisation, participants and co-creators, outcomes, impact in the world and reflection and review).
The scope, outcomes and impact of Living Labs can relate closely to one or more
of the UN SDGs. It should be noted that the UN SDGs are large-scale and longterm goals, where it is easy to think that single projects cannot visibly contribute.
Yet small scale or incremental changes both contribute to the whole and can be
scaled up to include more of an organisation, more organisations or similar projects
in different organisations or contexts. This is particularly the case, as University
campuses and their communities are significant in terms of urban and global built area
and population, as well as in educating society’s future leaders and global decision
makers.
In 2015, there were 18,500 HEIs worldwide, with 212 million students and 13
million teachers (EdStats 2018) and they are estimated to be responsible for 1.4% of
global CO 2 emissions (Verhoef 2018). Therefore, universities have a responsibility
to both reduce their negative impacts, improve their positive impacts, as well as
educate everyone on and around the campus to be able to view the world through a
sustainability lens, and be beacons of a move towards a more sustainable future.
4.2 Creating Value
The Living Lab framework presented in this chapter, aims to create value to University’s sustainability efforts in the following five ways:
1. to support the planning stages of campus-based sustainability projects, to ensure
that the educational, research and wider community benefits are maximised;
2. to support the monitoring of such projects, ensuring opportunities for benefits
are fully explored throughout;
3. to support the reflection and internal learning of a project once completed, and
ascertain ways to develop further impact;
4. as a tool to improve engagement and communication with diverse stakeholders;
5. as a way of disseminating good practice across the global sustainability HEI
community, allowing people from across the world to easily access detailed
case studies of processes, practices and products to inform their own work on
sustainable practices in their own HEIs.
Preliminary tests at the Delft University of Technology and the University of
Applied Sciences Stuttgart show that the framework aids in highlighting issues covered, issues discarded and issues ‘forgotten’, and hence highlight the potential of the
framework in delivering to both 1 and 2 of the ‘uses’ of the framework highlighted
above. However, these preliminary tests also highlighted that many stakeholders are
interested in the outcomes the framework delivers rather than the process. They value
the idea that a trustworthy actor (e.g. the Sustainability Office) puts its knowledge,
weight and confidence in the framework.
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key categories for data collection (referred to as general, scope, organisation, participants and co-creators, outcomes, impact in the world and reflection and review).
The scope, outcomes and impact of Living Labs can relate closely to one or more
of the UN SDGs. It should be noted that the UN SDGs are large-scale and longterm goals, where it is easy to think that single projects cannot visibly contribute.
Yet small scale or incremental changes both contribute to the whole and can be
scaled up to include more of an organisation, more organisations or similar projects
in different organisations or contexts. This is particularly the case, as University
campuses and their communities are significant in terms of urban and global built area
and population, as well as in educating society’s future leaders and global decision
makers.
In 2015, there were 18,500 HEIs worldwide, with 212 million students and 13
million teachers (EdStats 2018) and they are estimated to be responsible for 1.4% of
global CO 2 emissions (Verhoef 2018). Therefore, universities have a responsibility
to both reduce their negative impacts, improve their positive impacts, as well as
educate everyone on and around the campus to be able to view the world through a
sustainability lens, and be beacons of a move towards a more sustainable future.
4.2 Creating Value
The Living Lab framework presented in this chapter, aims to create value to University’s sustainability efforts in the following five ways:
1. to support the planning stages of campus-based sustainability projects, to ensure
that the educational, research and wider community benefits are maximised;
2. to support the monitoring of such projects, ensuring opportunities for benefits
are fully explored throughout;
3. to support the reflection and internal learning of a project once completed, and
ascertain ways to develop further impact;
4. as a tool to improve engagement and communication with diverse stakeholders;
5. as a way of disseminating good practice across the global sustainability HEI
community, allowing people from across the world to easily access detailed
case studies of processes, practices and products to inform their own work on
sustainable practices in their own HEIs.
Preliminary tests at the Delft University of Technology and the University of
Applied Sciences Stuttgart show that the framework aids in highlighting issues covered, issues discarded and issues ‘forgotten’, and hence highlight the potential of the
framework in delivering to both 1 and 2 of the ‘uses’ of the framework highlighted
above. However, these preliminary tests also highlighted that many stakeholders are
interested in the outcomes the framework delivers rather than the process. They value
the idea that a trustworthy actor (e.g. the Sustainability Office) puts its knowledge,
weight and confidence in the framework.