As part of the EU 1.5° Lifestyles project, two rounds of “Thinking Labs”, or problem-solving workshops, have already been organised in the five European case countries of Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Sweden and Spain.
The Citizen Thinking Labs are part of an effort to introduce households to individual lifestyle options they can adopt to be more sustainable, and to understand which options are more “acceptable” (or difficult to accept) for households in the different European case countries. The gamified EU 1.5° Lifestyles puzzle, created by D-mat, helped participants visualise their individual impacts, and understand where savings could be made, in the different consumption fields of nutrition, housing, mobility and leisure. You can read more about one of the Citizens Thinking Labs - in Hungary, here.
As well as focusing on individual household actions, a different variety of “Thinking Labs” were organised involving Stakeholders from media, policy, business, civil society and NGOs and experts. In these Stakeholder Thinking Labs, the focus was on understanding key structural barriers to 1.5° lifestyles, which hinder households in being able to adopt 1.5° lifestyles, and which steps should be taken for these to be overcome. The Stakeholder Thinking Labs also took place in the five project case countries (Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Sweden, Spain) and used an innovative backcasting approach to enable participants to think “outside the box” of normal policy recommendations. You can read about the experiences of the Stakeholder Thinking Labs in Germany, in Spain, and in Hungary. Besides, here is a short video about the Hungarian STL to give you an audiovisual insight how such a lab day looked like.
In the coming year, an EU-focused Stakeholder Thinking Lab in Brussels, as well as a second round of Citizen Thinking Labs and Stakeholder Thinking Labs will be organised as part of the project, in all five case countries.
WWU Münster
Source of pictures: EU 1.5° Lifestyles consortium partners ©