Background

Households in the Western world are facing a dynamic and complex future, due to societal issues such as an aging society, looming energy and water shortages, climate change problems, and growing constraints on (auto) mobility. Within this context, the home plays a key role: it is one of the key drivers in energy and water consumption while influencing our quality of life, lifestyle, and well-being.

In the past decade, a wide range of technologies have been developed with the residential building in mind, in particular to meet increasingly stringent regulations for e.g. energy efficiency. However, research insights show that new technologies do not always lead to the expected impact, due to unexpected use patterns. Occupant behaviour for example has been shown to influence 26-36% of household energy use, and may therefore completely offset potential benefits of energy saving (building) technologies.

As a result, it is crucial to consider the role of the inhabitant in new home concepts and technologies, and to help designers in using the technologies in the home environment to understand the interventions that change behaviour to be more sustainable direction. Currently research on sustainability in the built environment often not consider the user, due to inadequate research tools and lack of inter-disciplinary cooperation.

Goal

LIVING LAB’s general goal is to address environmentally critical forms of consumption and to contribute to the realisation of sustainable households in Europe.

In particular, we want to stimulate the mass-deployment of:

• Energy-efficient techniques and products for the home;
• Domestic products and techniques that use renewable energy sources;
• Water-saving techniques and products for the home.

The LIVING LAB infrastructure will enable scientists to understand and model the factors that motivate, shape and constrain the behaviour of occupants, and how we may achieve sustainable behaviour changes through physical/technical interventions in the domestic environment. Our fundamental research goals are twofold:

• To understand and model the way physical/technical interventions in the domestic environment change the behaviour of household consumers and its effects on the sustainable performance
• To validate the behaviour change models we develop, by evaluating their predictive quality for sustainable behavioural change in a realistic setting.