Living Labs offer a promising approach to develop and test sustainable system innovations. One particular type of Living Lab that has received limited attention is the Festival Living Lab (FLL). Festivals can be considered as temporary mini-societies, facing systemic sustainability challenges in areas such as water, energy, housing, logistics, waste management, food, and behaviour. The temporary nature of festivals allows for adjustments to the overall societal system, allowing for experimentation with the mutual interrelationships between different aspects of the system. This makes festivals a distinctive setting for exploring sustainable system innovations. To assess the potential of FLLs as effective real-life experimentation environments, we introduce the Living Lab Activity Framework (LLAF), distinguishing various innovation stages and system levels. We utilise the LLAF to evaluate a selection of innovation projects from the DORP FLL held at the Welcome to The Village (WTTV) festival in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. The analysis reveals that participating projects adapted their innovations based on new insights gained during various editions of the DORP FLL, demonstrating that festivals can support various stages of the innovation process on different system levels.

The use of Living Labs is a promising approach to develop and test sustainable system innovations. A Living Lab approach that is yet to be discussed in literature, is that of a Festival Living Lab (FLL). Festivals can be considered as temporary mini societies with systemic sustainability challenges regarding water, energy, housing, logistics, waste management, food and behaviour. Since a festival is built up from scratch every time the event is hosted, adjustments can be made to its overarching system, and mutual interrelations between different aspects of the system can be experimented with. To evaluate the potential of FLLs as effective real-life experimentation settings for sustainable system innovation we present the Living Lab Activity Framework (LLAF), distinguishing various innovation stages and system levels. We deploy the LLAF to evaluate a selection of innovation projects within the DORP Festival Living Lab at the Welcome to The Village festival in The Netherlands, demonstrating that festivals can host various stages of the innovation process on different system levels.

For a radical transformational change for sustainability, design requires an integrated approach, whereas designers have to contextualize their design from product and service level (micro) to integration in the socio-technical infrastructures (meso) towards the societal landscape (macro). Since design functions socially and its features relate to the social and psychological world of human, both technical and human centered aspects are important in design development. For this reason, many contemporary design paradigms advocate a user-centered and participatory approach. To accelerate design for transformational change, sustainability transition approaches emphasize the importance of purposive experimentation, often in the context of protected spaces. An approach that can facilitate this space for experimentation providing a real-life community with social, cultural and technical infrastructures to integrate design is that of festival living labs. Festivals are considered as meeting places of modern culture serving as temporary cities with a social and cultural role to strengthen communities, express social identities and worldviews. Most festivals are rebuilt every time they are hosted, and these iterations enable interventions to its infrastructures in relation to the festival community. Combining an integrated and
human-centered approach, we investigated how the festival community can be involved in experimentation for sustainable design at festival living labs.