To support sustainability transitions several different design approaches are required. In a series of Designerly Living Labs, we have prototyped possible sustainable futures in the context of people’s everyday lives to explore the complexities of lifestyle changes and socio-technical system shifts. Together with users engaged as reflexive co-researchers, we have explored potential new practices and uncovered system-level tensions and deficiencies. System changes have been initiated by engaging relevant actors in learning processes and by bridging learning to decision-makers. However, the approach requires some rethinking of design as a practice. Instead of supporting people’s current needs and lifestyles, we design for sustainable futures that users do not yet request. This emerging design practice challenges traditional co-design and user participation methods, leading to new ethical considerations.

Systemic and transformative change is needed to address the sustainability issues of our time, and there is a growing consensus that this requires real-life experimentation involving the people and stakeholders affected by the change. Research infrastructures are increasingly set up to provide places for such experimentation and innovation, known as eg. living labs, transformation labs, urban or real-world laboratories. Several authors have however noted that real-life experimentation mostly takes place in late stages of testing and implementation, and with evaluative purposes. In contrast, this paper introduces a methodology for design-driven or ‘designerly’ living labs specifically used to frame complex sustainability issues in early research stages. By presenting four such designerly living labs, carried out in Stockholm, Sweden, from 2014 to 2022 on an operative level, this methodology is compared to more common approaches. The analysis shows that the methodology has repeatedly produced unexpected research outcomes that challenges the current framing of an issue, and how the learning experiences have enabled both people, private and public actors to innovate in their lives and operations.

Digitally enabled neighbourhood telecommuting centres (NTCs) in residential areas may have the potential to reduce the environmental burdens of transport by shortening work trips and enabling modal shifts. This paper presents the results of a Living Lab where 67 participants were given access to an NTC. Through this Living Lab, this study identifies several conditions required for an NTC to substantially reduce commuting and overall have a positive impact on sustainable travel. The results indicate that while a small group of participants who lived very close to the NTC made significant lifestyle changes and adopted more sustainable travel practices, the overall changes in the sustainability aspects of travel for most participants were minimal. The majority of the participants merely exchanged a day spent working from home for a day at the NTC, as they were only allowed to be absent from the employer’s office one day per week. Further, some participants found it difficult to work remotely due to organisational roles and workplace norms. Another factor that limited the sustainability effect of the NTC was that most participants normally commuted by train, but in a few cases travelled to the NTC by car. With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, most participants were required to work exclusively from home, which proved to have both positive and negative effects on the participants’ everyday lives and well-being. The participants reported a radical shift in attitudes towards remote working during this period, which they believed could lead to remote working becoming more common after the pandemic. In this case, NTCs could possibly play an important role in enabling this shift, by remedying some of the identified drawbacks of working from home. This could in turn enable a larger reduction in commuting. In areas where more people commute by car, sustainability effects would likely be greater.

Sustainability challenges demands that we live smaller and more efficient in terms of re-sources and energy, at the same time, loneliness and mental unhealth are in-creasing among young people and students. One solution to both ecological and social sustain-ability is provided by coliving, where a small group of people share a home. Living in a shared home is an opportunity for friendship and sense of community but is also associated with frictions. This paper describes an interdisciplinary and experimental research project about coliving for students and particularly focuses on the social aspects and new practices of living together. We conclude that a small homelike environment has great potential to create the social belonging young people need as well as spreading sustainable practices, but there has to be a so-cial and practical structures there from the start in order to create a resilient and safe space for living.

It is increasingly clear that the sustainability transitions needed to counter climate change depend on lifestyle changes. However, the task of encouraging a shift to more sustainable lifestyles is highly complex. This paper describes an emerging design research method to explore possible pathways towards such sustainable transitions. We describe a living labs-approach based on design practice, developed within Green Leap, a design and sustainability research group at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. We refer to this method as Designerly Living Labs. Based on empirical learnings from four such Living Labs we present eight key characteristics. We then highlight some important aspects that affect how future concepts and solutions can be explored in connection with the lifestyles and material contexts on which they depend. One finding is that ‘living the change’ may be needed to identify potential positive, and often social gains from more sustainable practices.

New mobility solutions, such as Mobility as a Service, have been suggested to have the potential to reduce car ownership and be part of a transition towards a more sustainable transportation system. However, research suggests that governance measures such as taxation and policies will be needed to ensure sustainability aspects. This paper explores everyday mobility by use of interventions in people's everyday lives. The focus is on identifying underlying factors that may motivate or hinder changes that are positive from a sustainability perspective. This is then put in the perspective of new mobility services and policy making. Our findings support the view that privately owned cars are hard to replace with new mobility services that contribute to sustainability and are not based on individual cars. Economic interventions for increased sustainability will likely have limited effects, since the alternatives do not offer what car owners value most. Also, limited understanding of the car's full costs may make the new services appear comparatively more expensive. Furthermore, urban planning to reduce the need for travel, and the capacity of the physical public transport infrastructure will continue to be important. Long vacation trips and "medium sized flows" are identified as opportunities for further research and for new solutions to support sustainable mobility transitions.

To reach the full potential of Mobility as a Service (MaaS), especially its projected positive environmental impacts, the barriers to development and implementation processes must be identified. However, studies identifying such MaaS barriers are rare. Following an interdisciplinary approach, this paper aims to bridge this gap by adding knowledge on barriers to MaaS development and implementation using four perspectives (service design, business model, user travel attitude and behavior, and system impacts). Following a systems thinking approach, the barriers are investigated at three levels (individual, organizational and societal) to show their relationships. This paper investigates a specific type of MaaS, namely Corporate Mobility as a Service (CMaaS). The results obtained by investigating a large-scale CMaaS pilot provide implications of general barriers to MaaS development and implementation. The findings presented in this paper provide knowledge and guidance to MaaS stakeholders.

Mobility as a Service (MaaS), where different shared modes of transportation are bundled into one easily accessible service, plays an important role in the shift towards more sustainable transport systems. In this article, we present empirical research with the aim to understand how the barriers to increased shared travel with MaaS can be lowered. The concept of corporate MaaS (CMaaS) is introduced, and empirical results are presented from a study of CMaaS at a workplace of 14,000 employees in Sweden. The findings are based on 77 interviews with CMaaS users, performed in four iterative rounds using service design methods. Social practice theories are used as analytical lens to attempt to understand travel practices in the context of CMaaS. As CMaaS (and MaaS) are socio-technical systems, several perspectives need to be integrated in order to reach this understanding; all system components, including materials (e.g. the user application, the transport modes), competences (knowledge of how to use the materials), and meanings (understandings of travel habits, lifestyle choices, and employer relations) need to be analysed. Through this analytical lens, three barriers to adoption of CMaaS and sustainable transport were identified: inadequate integration of the internal transport system with external transport systems; corporate policy, culture and norms that conflict with using the services; and system limitations due to laws and regulations. All these barriers are also relevant for understanding MaaS services in general.