Living Labs
As a campus-based university with academic and retail spaces, halls of residence, and private housing, along with considerable grounds, Keele is representative of a small town. Keele University is in an ideal place to use our campus as a classroom and adopt a living laboratory approach to our research, learning and teaching, and student experience.
Keele’s flagship sustainability projects SEND and HyDeploy demonstrate excellence in Living Lab approaches, however using our campus as a space for students to research, test projects and learning in the real-world, and for researchers to conduct world-leading research that can feed into local and national governmental policy and action make our Living Lab approach really powerful. Keele has featured as a Living Lab Case Study for the EAUC (Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges) and further living lab projects include renewable energy and smart roads.
Further learning opportunities for students include Keele’s Sustainability Bungalow where students ‘live sustainability’ and drive their own projects; the Greening Business module which enables students to explore and propose solutions to real-world sustainability challenges teams from Catering to Grounds are working on; to the Environment and Sustainability Consultancy Study module working with Keele stakeholders and wider community groups from councils to education charities to propose solutions to sustainability challenges they face.
Keele supports and celebrates projects for sustainable development from Schools, Faculties and research teams through resources such as the Sustainability Intranet, Keele App, Module Case Studies documents, student research and ESD case studies created for events like the SDG Teach In, and news stories. Examples include the School of Medicine students leading on submitting a return to the Planetary Health Report card resulting in the School ranking highest in the UK. Keele’s Sustainability Benchmark also enables sharing of practice and projects and teams/individuals are frequently nominated for Green Gown awards in recognition of their achievements.