Marco Molinari: "Using living labs to tackle research and innovation bottlenecks: the KTH Live-In Lab case study"

Abstract: The adoption of innovation in the building sector is currently too slow for the ambitious sustainability goals that our societies have agreed upon. Living labs are open innovation ecosystems in real-life environments using iterative feedback processes throughout a lifecycle approach of an innovation to create sustainable impact. In the context of the built environment, such co-creative innovation and demonstration platforms are needed to facilitate the adoption of innovative technologies and concepts for more energy-efficient and sustainable buildings. However, their feasibility is not extensively proven.

This presentation illustrates the design and the implementation of the Live-In Lab, a successful living lab for buildings. The goal of the Live-In Lab is to create a co-creative open platform for research and education bridging the gap between industry and academia, featuring smart building demonstrators. The design principles and the co-creative process, based on the Living Labs Triangle Framework, is introduced.

Next, the presentation discusses methodological and operational results, including performance metrics to measure the economic sustainability, the promotion of multidisciplinary research and development projects, dissemination and impact.

Finally, the presentation shows examples of innovative research enabled by the Live-In Lab, with results from selected projects on energy efficiency, occupant behavior and interaction between occupants and smart building systems.

Bio: Dr. Marco Molinari is researcher at the Department of Energy Technology and co-director of the Live-In Lab at KTH. He received his Ph.D. degree in Building Technology from KTH, in 2012, and from 2013 to 2016 he has been postdoctoral researcher at the ACCESS Linnaeus Centre and at the Department of Automatic Control at KTH.

He is author of several scientific articles at the intersection of energy efficiency and digitalization in buildings and is in the editorial board of International Review of Applied Sciences and Engineering. He is supervisor of two doctoral students and of several theses in the field of low energy buildings design, energy management and conservation in the built environment and in buildings’ controls.

His research interests focus on smart buildings, living labs and building testbeds, and on the integration of digitalization in buildings, with applications to energy efficiency, energy monitoring, behavioral modeling and deployment of advanced control approaches.