Evaluation and Lessons Learned from a Campus as a Living Lab Program to Promote Sustainable Practices

Abstract

Any group that creates challenging goals also requires a strategy to achieve them and a process to review and improve this strategy over time. The University of British Columbia (UBC) set ambitious campus sustainability goals, including a reduction in its greenhouse gas emissions to 33% below the 2007 level by 2015, and 100% by 2050 (UBC, 2006). The University pursued these goals through a number of specific projects (such as major district energy upgrade and a bioenergy facility) and, more generally, through a “Campus as a Living Lab” (CLL) initiative to marry industry, campus operations, and research to drive innovative solutions. The CLL program has achieved significant successes while also demonstrating many opportunities for improvements and lessons learned. The aim of this study was to examine the UBC CLL program, to identify and formalize its operations, to extract key transferable characteristics, and to propose replicable processes that other universities and municipalities can follow to expand their sustainable practices in similar ways. There was a learning curve with implementing a CLL program at UBC; thus, the goal of this study was to potentially shorten this learning curve for others. The research involved an ethnographic approach in which researchers participated in the CLL process, conducted qualitative analysis, and captured the processes through a series of business process models. The research findings are shared in two parts: 1. generalized lessons learned through key transferrable characteristics; 2. a series of generic organizational charts and business process models (BPMs) culminated with learned strategies through defined processes that illustrate what was required to create a CLL program at UBC. A generalized future improvement plan for UBC CLL programs is defined, generic BPMs about CLL projects are evaluated, and the level of engagement of multiple stakeholders through phases of project life cycle given in the conclusion for future use of other Living Lab organizations.

Research on sustainability leadership in higher education: a scoping review

“…One innovative development in sustainability research and development lies in “living labs.” This is a user-centered, open-innovation, experimental educational approach that encourages faculty and students to engage in on-campus and off-campus collaborative research projects (Purcell et al , 2019). Living lab projects initiated at universities around the world have tackled a wide range of sustainability challenges including climate change, social equity, green energy and sustainable economic growth (Purcell et al , 2019; Save et al , 2021).…”

“…This should be an educative conversation supported by leaders at every level of the university, not only at the top (Maak and Pless, 2006; Siegel, 2014). For instance, university-community partnered living labs can bring together internal and external stakeholders to work on local sustainability issues (Purcell et al , 2019; Save et al , 2021).…”

Living labs in the context of the UN sustainable development goals: state of the art

“…The Sustainable Energy Campus at the University of Lisbon promotes the use of smart resources to reduce electricity consumption and to promote socially responsible actions (Ferrão and de Matos 2017). The University of British Columbia (Save et al 2021; UBC, n.d.) and the Chatham University Eden Hall Campus (Walker and Mendler 2017) operate with wider scopes. The former works as a living lab with its academic campuses and integrated residential neighbourhoods to test innovative solutions, expand a bioenergy facility, and contribute to several local policies (e.g., the 20-year Sustainability Strategy, the Climate Action Plan, and the Green Building Action Plan), whereas the latter is the first university campus designed to demonstrate sustainable solutions and train students while engaging with the local community.…”

An investigation of the design process’s effect on a high-performance building’s actual energy system performance

“…There are multiple publications in literature about the building project, questioning the technical reasons of energy performance gap (Mallory-Hill & Gorgolewski, 2018;Gorgolewski et al, 2016;Salehi et al, 2015a;2015b;Fedoruk et al, 2015;Terim Cavka et al, 2014), and social/behavioural reasons questioned by post-occupancy evaluation studies and other social tests (Yamagata et al, 2020;Coleman & Robinson, 2017;Cole et al, 2013). Since the CIRS project is defined as a learning project, all the lessons learned on building performance and Campus as a Living Lab program are stated multiple times (Save et al, 2021;Pilon et al, 2020;Fedoruk et al, 2015;Salehi et al, 2015a). However, this study has a different perspective as creating a quantitative content analysis method from qualitative meetings' documentation dataset, to be able to investigate the bigger picture of reasons on the quantitative performance gap given in previous studies specifically (Gorgolewski et al, 2016;Salehi et al, 2015a;2015b;Fedoruk et al, 2015;Terim Cavka et al, 2014).…”