Living Labs
Our campus - and South Yorkshire - are real-world test sites for sustainability. Living labs bring students, staff and partners together to trial ideas, measure impact and scale what works - from energy and materials to nature and wellbeing.
A living lab turns a real challenge into a practical experiment. It brings together academic expertise, student insight and operational know-how to test solutions in real settings - a building, a lab, a café, a street or a neighbourhood - and use evidence to improve what we do next.
At Sheffield, living labs help us move from pilots on campus to wider impact across the city and South Yorkshire. They also create valuable opportunities for students to learn through real projects and contribute directly to positive change.
How living labs work at Sheffield
- Start with a real challenge from campus operations or city-region priorities - energy, materials, travel, climate resilience, health and wellbeing.
- Bring the right mix of people together - academics, students, professional services and external partners - to shape a practical pilot.
- Trial, measure, improve using monitoring, surveys, prototypes and user feedback - then iterate.
- Build learning into education through dissertation topics, placements, studio projects and challenge-based briefs, so students develop skills while contributing to delivery.
- Scale what works - from a single site to multiple buildings, across the city, or into wider regional programmes with partners
Recent living lab projects
1) Net-zero campus behaviours and hybrid working
Using a living lab framework and a University-wide survey to understand which low-carbon changes staff and students support - and how views shifted pre- and post-pandemic, including the role of hybrid ways of working.
Read more: Towards a net-zero carbon campus research
2) Reusable packaging in campus cafés
Trials of reuse systems in University cafés to cut single-use packaging, test what drives participation, and demonstrate how everyday services can reduce waste.
Read more: Many Happy Returns and campus reuse
3) Cutting single-use plastic with a circular milk supply
Working with a local supplier to switch café milk deliveries from single-use bottles to reusable stainless-steel churns, reducing waste and emissions through a practical, scalable model.
Read more: Milk churns project
4) Digital Innovation Zone - living lab for digital twins and real-time data
A ‘living lab’ space developed with Siemens that gives students hands-on access to technologies like live-stream data analytics and digital twin simulation.
Read more: Digital Innovation Zone living lab
5) Green roofs as climate-ready infrastructure
Using University buildings as monitored green roof sites to explore benefits like biodiversity, cooling and sustainable drainage - and to generate performance evidence that informs future design.
Read more: The Green Roof Centre
6) Greener school playgrounds for cleaner air
A project co-developed with a local school to design and test green barriers that can reduce air pollution exposure, combining community need with research, monitoring and evaluation.
7) Urban Flows Observatory - Sheffield as a city-scale sensing testbed
Deploying mobile and fixed sensors around Sheffield to understand how energy and resources flow through the city, creating evidence that supports healthier, lower-carbon urban decisions.
Read more: Understanding the flow of energy and resources in cities
8) Retrofitting homes at street scale in Doncaster
Partnering with Doncaster to improve housing energy performance using neighbourhood-level data collection (including the MARVel vehicle) to target retrofit measures that reduce emissions and support wellbeing.
Read more: Retrofitting Doncaster’s housing stock
9) South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre - scaling from campus to region
A partnership centre connecting research to regional priorities, using South Yorkshire as a testbed for solutions that support a just transition - including tools to prioritise housing retrofit and climate adaptation at scale.
Read more: Regional retrofit optimisation platform (SYSC)
Get involved
If you have a sustainability challenge linked to a building, service, outdoor space or local partnership - or a student project idea that would benefit from a real-world setting - a living lab approach can help turn it into a measurable, shareable pilot with the potential to scale.