Playlab, an educational initiative of the School of Architecture, Art and Design of the Tecnologico de Monterrey University, provides a steady academic base for innovation in product co-design adapting to changing social and cultural contexts. Play Lab aims to bring students from different disciplines together to tackle social challenges within a specific local community as a platform for social innovation and moving beyond the classroom into an established social community. The professors deploy a wide arrange of participatory and ethnographic tools from which students choose and implement in the specific community context. Thus, the students have to go through a full and profound social and urban research of the chosen context before deciding on a viable collaboration design. Play Lab has had three iterations with different students in 2016, 2017 and 2018. This paper hopes to compile, compare and explain the processes and results of Play Lab while analysing some variables as a reference. Using a methodology proposed by Hansson et al. (2011) we performed an evaluation of the aforementioned iterations. We believe we have gained clarity regarding future strategies, methods and tools to be further used in Play Lab, our academic alternative for social innovation.

The Covid-19 crisis has been described as the "greatest challenge that humankind has faced since the 2 nd World War," having an impact on health, society, and the global economy. Houses and domestic spaces are key sites through which COVID-19 is experienced, thus, an interdisciplinary approach is needed. The goal of this research project is to forge an analytical approach while experimenting with micro-ethnography and auto-ethnography tools to analyse how we inhabit the domestic spaces in complex situations of confinement imposition in order to arrive at an outward reflection from within. The project reflects on an innovative social experiment that opens up new paths of design provoking to help us rethink the domestic space. This paper has the objective to compile, compare and explain the processes and results around the characterization of the domestic space, centring on the person in times of confinement through an ethnographic approach.

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